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.