A Prologue to the AJPH Supplement: Using Evidence to Expand Contraceptive Access

Expanding contraceptive access, within the broader goal of achieving sexual and reproductive health and well-being for all people, can support the attainment of individuals' personal goals. Evidence of the effects of initiatives to expand contraceptive access for individual, community, clinical, and health outcomes can support the scaling-up of initiatives. This special issue of AJPH, sponsored by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), highlights efforts to expand contraceptive access, particularly statewide initiatives, and features articles describing how these projects are conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated.Over the past 15 years, statewide initiatives to expand contraceptive access have been implemented in multiple US states. Statewide contraceptive access initiatives are population-level approaches, typically serving large geographic regions, that require collaboration among multisectoral partners. In these initiatives, a coalition of organizations undertakes coordinated efforts to expand contraceptive access, such as providing clinical training and capacity building and mobilizing for policy change. A growing body of evidence suggests that these initiatives have the potential to expand access, improve health outcomes, and advance the provision of person-centered care.This special issue, "Using Evidence to Expand Contraceptive Access," contextualizes the unique role contraceptive access initiatives play in addressing barriers to access, defines and demonstrates the application of common intervention and evaluation components across statewide initiatives, explores the evolution of these initiatives from approaches based on method effectiveness to personcentered approaches that support access to a broad range of contraceptive methods, and presents key lessons learned and early findings emerging from these initiatives. These initiatives offer a lens through which to critically examine how contraceptive access policy is shaped; how policy is translated into practice in communities, care delivery settings, and public health systems; and how advocacy for equity, justice, and human rights has reshaped, and continues to reshape, the field's approach to contraceptive access efforts.The issue also features a set of invited articles that explore the importance of, and models for, integrating principles of person centeredness and reproductive health equity in contraceptive access initiatives; consider the role of the federal go