How abortion bans make inequality worse

Imagine two similar women, who  each have unwanted pregnancies. They both go to abortion clinics. One has a pregnancy that’s just days before the clinic’s gestational limit. And the other is just days past the limit. So one of them receives an abortion. And the other is turned away. Their different life trajectories after that  might not tell you a lot on their own...   but if you were to track this  scenario for hundreds of women,  you could gather a lot of  data on what life looks like after women are denied an abortion. This was the concept for a huge  naturalized experiment in the US  that tracked this for the first time. For five years, every six months,  researchers called the women  to see how their lives had progressed. And one of the things their research uncovered was the financial impact of forced parenthood. What they heard from these calls reveals the high economic cost of an abortion ban and exactly who is made to bear that cost. Hello? There's no way that you don't have a child and love and want that child. And I very much feel that way about my son. But that isn't how we began. I felt like I was drowning and  had zero control over my life  and having an abortion felt  like reaching out for air. The voices you hear in this  video weren’t part of the study. But their stories overlap  with some of its findings. I was six months along and so at that point I had to carry to term. There wasn't a choice of: am I going to give birth or not? I've actually made that decision twice in life. For me, they both felt pretty easy right away. Roughly 60% of women in the study and abortion  seekers in the US are already parents. Abortion seekers in the study and more broadly are much more likely to be a person of color when compared to the general population. And are almost four times as  likely to live in poverty. And that can be about who  has access to contraception who has had great sex ed classes who can negotiate contraceptive use with a partner and it's also about who can  accommodate a surprise pregnancy. Diana Greene Foster is a  demographer who led the study,  which she calls The Turnaway Study. Among all women in the study,  there are 3 groups we’ll focus on. One group was women who got an abortion in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy the first trimester. This stage of pregnancy is  when about 90% of abortions  in the US happen in the general population. But for the study it was underrepresented and used as a control group for this group: women who got abortions within two weeks of an abortion clinics’ gestational limit, which averaged at the 20 week mark. This later-term abortion group is a less  common abortion experience in the US. But for the purposes of the  study, was overrepresented,  in order to compare to this third group: women who just barely missed the gestational limit and were denied an abortion. This last group is called the turnaway group. The Turnaway Study hinges on comparing  the outcomes of these two groups. But comparing the two groups of  women who sought later-term abortions  to the first-trimester group  can tell us something, too. 40% of the first-trimester group  were living under the poverty line. But 57% of the later-term abortion group were. Lack of money slows people down and prevents them from moving as quickly to getting an abortion. When wealthy women have unwanted pregnancies, they're more likely to get their abortion. And that's because they can afford to do it. They can travel, they can pay for the procedure, they can get time off work. In fact, when the women in the study were surveyed about their motivations for wanting an abortion “Not financially prepared”  was the most common response. What was going on in your life when  you had an unplanned pregnancy? We were barely able to scrape by at that point. And there was just not enough money. The financial situation was like a really big deciding factor for me. I just graduated from undergrad. I was doing an unpaid fellowship. We live in the Bay Area. You definitely need a dual income  household to be able to live well. So we were not okay financially. Because of my documentation process, I couldn't legally work. I was just starting my professional  career when I found out I was pregnant. I was three months into my  first real job out of college. One thing researchers asked the  study participants over the years was whether the relationship that  led to the pregnancy had lasted. This was to try to get an idea of  whether these women had support. At the time of the abortion clinic visit 80% of the study participants said they were still in this relationship. By the second year, that number fell to 60%. And by the 5th year, only about 27% of them were. Regardless of whether women in the study  received or were denied an abortion the likelihood of the relationship working out was low. He gets to go off and live his  life and forget that he's a father. While my entire life is about being  a mother and caretaking for this person. It is already like a lot to go  through unexpectedly and it's a lot to do it on my own. The high likelihood of that  relationship ending makes sense given that another common reason for wanting an abortion was for “partner-related” reasons. I don't know that it would  have been a healthy thing for ourselves or a child to have to endure those types of disagreements that type of conflict, that type of disconnect. Trying to measure other types of support, researchers found that 5 years on women denied abortions were more likely to be living alone with their children than women who received  abortions and had other children. It didn't look like they  were getting a lot of support  from their partners or their immediate family. We looked at child support payments. On average, it was only about $20 a month. $20 in child support... that's extremely low. Yea and this is a lot of people  reporting getting $0 in child support and then a few people reporting getting  normal amounts of child support. And finally, the researchers gathered  financial data for these two groups... to figure out what becoming a parent  without much support looks like. We linked the participants in the turnaway study  to ten years of credit reporting agency data. And this went back before their pregnancies. Researchers looked at  financial distress indicators,  like debt or evictions, in the two groups. And before the turnaway group  gave birth, the two groups  were on similar economic trajectories. But after the turnaway group gave birth, the two groups diverged and the level of financial distress for  the women denied an abortion spiked. We saw this big spike in financial problems in the turnaway group. Nearly 80% higher amounts of debt  that was 30 days or more past due. 78% increase in things like  bankruptcies or liens or evictions  where you're ordered to pay the  landlord some amount of money. And we saw a big spike in those. So some people might look at this research and say... you're going to be more financially  strained if you have a child  because your life is just  going to be more expensive. So why is it important to look at this  in relation to an abortion denial? One thing we did to investigate this question was we looked in the near-limit group. So some of the women who  initially obtained an abortion later went on and had a pregnancy that resulted in a child and they gave birth. After the births of their children, the financial distress indicators for these two groups looks like this. Which shows the more severe financial penalties for women having children when parenting is wanted versus after an abortion denial. The women in this study were  seeking abortions because  they knew that this was a bad time for them. They knew this was a time where it would  be potentially really, really costly and really damaging to them and  their economic circumstances. And not just their own: 55% of the children of the women who were able to get an abortion were living in poverty but that number rose to 72% for the children of the women who were denied. Which is relevant to another  common reason study participants  gave for wanting an abortion: the “need to focus on other children.” One of your fears, when you were deciding whether or not to have an abortion was that you wouldn't be  able to afford the childcare. And I'm wondering how much of those fears were realized for you? Oh 100% of those fears were realized from me. I don't have childcare now. There's still no way to  afford childcare on my salary. Something the Turnaway Study shows is that these reasons turned  into accurate predictions  of what the women would struggle with after an abortion denial. Women understand the consequences  of unwanted pregnancy and when they're trying to decide whether to have an abortion or have a baby they understand completely  what the outcomes will be. I was able to go to law school and  complete the degree that I had been   saying I wanted to do since I was eight years old. My life outside of being a mother has just been  exponentially harder and almost impossible. And there was mourning  for the life that I imagined. There was just no way I would have the  time or the money to do those things... like going to grad school  or moving away from family. I was able to fight a deportation case and I have a career. I was able to get out of a  marriage that just wasn't working because I didn't have to think about  how I'd impacted somebody else. I get to define my life the way that I want  to without having to factor in a family. If somebody tells you they're not  ready to carry a pregnancy to term... They're not. Believe them.

Channel: Vox

Views: 439,517

Keywords: Vox.com, abortion, abortion bans, explain, explainer, forced parenthood, roe v wade, turnaway study, vox, women's health, roe v wade overturned, abortion restrictions, forced parenting, UCSF abortion study, UCSF, Diana Greene Foster, katie woodruff, gretchen sisson, economic inequality, right to an abortion, abortion ban us, income inequality, poverty, poverty line, poverty cycle, abortion study, abortion impact

Id: 1O_YHxd_HWQ

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022