Polling & Research
Women’s Health – March 2026
Published on March 16, 2026
Center Forward released a national survey, conducted by Echelon Insights and Impact Research, of 1,206 registered voters examining Americans’ views on the state of women’s health care. The results indicate strong bipartisan agreement that women’s health care deserves greater attention and that policymakers should work to increase access to a range of services critical to women.
Voters across the spectrum emphasized the importance of ensuring women can receive critical health services, including cancer screenings, prenatal and postpartum care, gynecological and cardiovascular services, as well as support for diabetes and weight management. Among those polled, women are 4 points more likely than men to say they have a hard time finding quality health care. This is especially true in rural areas, where women are 7 points more likely than men to say so.
Key Takeaways:
Voters believe that it is important to ensure women have access to key women’s health services – but feel the system today is not doing a good job meeting the health needs of women.
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Only 25% of voters believe the system does a very good or good job meeting the health needs of women.
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9-in-10 voters, including 89% of Republicans and 95% of Democrats, agree that women have unique health needs that deserve specific attention.
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More than two-thirds of voters believe that it is very important for policymakers to ensure women have access to things like screenings for cancers specific to women (81%), prenatal care (78%), gynecological care (77%), care for cardio health (77%), care for postpartum (72%), diabetes care and weight management (68%).
Most voters (71%) feel that it should be easy to for women to access over-the-counter emergency contraception.
- Nearly three-quarters (72%) of voters would like policy makers to protect access to birth control, including over-the-counter emergency contraception.
- This is an area of strong bipartisan agreement, with 65% of Republicans, 70% of independents and 80% of Democrats agreeing.
Survey Methodology:
Echelon Insights conducted a survey on behalf of Center Forward to study the issue of women’s health in the United States. The survey was fielded online from January 12-16, 2026 in English among a sample of 1,206 voters in the likely electorate nationwide using non-probability sampling. The sample was drawn from the Lucid sample exchange based on demographic quota targets for registered voters in the likely electorate nationwide, and matched to the L2 voter file to verify respondents’ voter registration status.
The sample was weighted to reflect modeled turnout and demographic characteristics of the population of voters in the 2026 likely electorate nationwide based on a probabilistic model that incorporates data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement, as well as L2 voter file data. Weighting dimensions included gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, region, party registration (or lack thereof), turnout probability, and voting history, as well as gender by age, race by education, and age by education.
Calculated the way it would be for a random sample and adjusted to incorporate the effect of weighting, the margin of sampling error is ± 3.2 percentage points.