The journal Demography published a new study on September 8th that purports to show that women in states with pro-life laws are worse off… because they’re having more babies.
The Cornell Chronicle article discussing the new study claimed that women in states with pro-life laws “were 13% more likely to have a live birth resulting from an unintended pregnancy than those in states where abortion care was more accessible.” For the authors of the study, more babies being born represents a failure, a net negative, and provides a glimpse into the bias behind the research.
The study found an association between “abortion hostility” in a locale, defined as “state-level restrictive abortion policies and the subsequent hostile environment toward abortion they create,” and “unintended” live births. These “unintended” births were measured by a question asking women whether they had intended to get pregnant prior to finding out they were pregnant.
One possible answer, “I wanted to be pregnant later,” was grouped with women who never wanted to be pregnant, inflating on paper the number of women who might have gotten abortions.
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The study goes on to say that the women most affected by “abortion hostility” are women of lower socioeconomic means, and teenagers. “Higher state-level policy hostility toward abortion was most strongly associated with live birth resulting from unintended pregnancy for younger women, women with lower levels of educational attainment,” and that the increased birth rate “among women aged 19 or younger was almost three times that of the average woman in the sample.”
In other words, there were women who felt they could not financially support a baby, and teenagers who also might have chosen an abortion that instead had their babies. The implication is that lack of financial, medical, educational, or other support is a justification for abortion, and takes the births of these babies as a net negative, a life-ruining event for many women.
The infamous “Turnaway Study” authored by Diana Greene Foster — which has many significant problems — also attempted to prove that women who cannot get abortions are worse off. That study purported that women who had less support from family and friends were more likely to wish they had had an abortion. It also found that among women who could not get abortions, five years later 96% of women no longer wished they could have had an abortion, and the economic disparity between women who got or did not get an abortion had diminished or disappeared altogether.
In addition, these biased researchers assume that “abortion is a human right,” implying that all women are (or should be) in support of abortion. A pro-life legislative atmosphere in a state – described as “abortion hostility” – is therefore a failure of representative government rather than a reflection of the pro-life values of the population that includes women. The study then neglects the actual thoughts and feelings of the women they purport to study.
But one thing co-author Sharon Sassler pointed out that pro-lifers can get behind is that, in some of the states that prevent abortions, more can be done to support the women that feel trapped by financial or other circumstances into seeking out abortion.
“Providing broader access to health insurance coverage, getting women prenatal care earlier on in their pregnancy, and extending insurance coverage for longer periods of time after they give birth is just one way of taking better care of women and children,” Sassler said, according to the Chronicle.
