In Favor of Feminism: Share Your Views
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Here is a FB poster also perplexed why Texas doesn’t use other measures to address abortion, and a few replies she received:
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Divine, the stats for Texas are really disappointing but not entirely unexpected, just this morning I had to scroll through several channels to find something other than religious programming or football.
Growing up in California, I was fortunate to have Health class coving real issues like STDs/AIDS without any churchy preaching at all. Unfortunately, so many issues are intertwined that it’s nearly impossible to educate simple facts without people jumping in to stop it. I wish more parents would teach their kids, both male and female, what school doesn’t (sex ed, finance, dealing with life difficulties).
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illimae, I so agree when you say: “Unfortunately, so many issues are intertwined that it's nearly impossible to educate simple facts without people jumping in to stop it.“
It is difficult to even have a conversation on the topic of abortion it is so taboo. If you say you are pro-choice, another will accuse you of being “pro-abortion." A twisting of words that confuses the issue. There is a lot of nuance on this topic, but for many, there is no room for discussion. I don't think I've ever had a person in real life ask me where I stand on the issue, or even bring it up at all, other than several women I know who had one.
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France, Britain and Spain are pretty low on this list, which is relevant to the contraception issue. While I support religious freedom, it has no place in policy and influence in education. The US needs to teach that at home, if it’s important to the family.
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Wow. I had no idea what role religion played in other countries, so that’s a fascinating chart.
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One more post on the topic today, tho I still have more to say and will get back here in a day or two.
“A satirical group in Nebraska are looking to fight abortion reformers with a tongue-in-cheek campaign called 'Boners Kill'. The organization, known as Pro-Life Nebraska, describes themselves as a group that advocates for policies that "actually save lives" without "controlling the bodies of people with uteruses, killing them, or resulting in unwanted birth". They created this pamphlet:
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Divin...I posted the prolifnebraska website on facebook.
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Thanks Divine, posted to facebook prolifenebraska - boners kill. Waiting for replies.
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Devine - love the "how can I prevent abortion" - ejaculate into jello. Woo Hoo.
As I see it & lots of posts on this site concur - they are not supporting "right to life". They are supporting "right to birth". After the kid drops, they don't care about the life of the baby. And certainly not the life of the mother.
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That’s right, MinusTwo. Those claiming right to life are often against providing any support for that life once it’s born. It is a control of women issue.
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DivineMrsM, "If you say you are pro-choice, another will accuse you of being 'pro-abortion.' A twisting of words that confuses the issue. There is a lot of nuance on this topic, but for many, there is no room for discussion."
Exactly, as I see being done on this very thread. If you are pro-life you are "anti-women". This is my point. How are we as Americans ever going to stop fighting about this subject if no compromises can be reached? The extremists have all of the press, all of the control. They are the ones who passed this horrible Texas law. Statistically most Americans believe abortion should be legal, but with restrictions (as it currently is in most states). Extremists won't leave it alone, though. Without open, caring conversations between those with different views I don't feel like we'll ever have a stable set of laws around abortion in this country.
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For the women who prefer to be unattached:
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Anti Cupid spray - great idea!!0 -
From my perspective, society conditions women to feel guilty if they want “more” out of life than just being a mother. If a woman makes the choice to abort a fetus due to financial hardship, society claims she is selfish, greedy, inhuman. Of course, men are permitted to charge full speed ahead to get whatever it is out of life that they want. Women are not to be demanding. Women must sacrifice for the good of their unborn or they are not womanly enough. So there is this box that women must fit their lives into in order to be accepted. There is no room for any thinking outside the box or it is considered abnormal. Conform. No need to think for yourself. The men will do that for you!
One answer to the abortion issue is free contraception. Yet we have states that do not want to teach students about it, much less distribute it without cost. To me, some of the debate centers around society's hang up with women's sexuality. Why, if birth control was free, all these women might go around fucking for fun! And a lot of people believe a woman should only copulate with the intent to get pregnant and have a baby. Like it’s a chore. Women are expected to look sexy and appealing, but that is for the benefit of the male gaze. Men have always been given a pass to "sow their wild oats". Society does not want women to indulge.
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Here is yet another perspective on Texas' abortion ruling. In the case of rape, a victim has only six weeks to discover whether she is pregnant. Yet Texas has 12 weeks to process a rape kit, giving a rapist 90 days to flee. Texas currently has more than 6,000 untested rape kits sitting on shelves.
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Link to end the backlog website: https://www.endthebacklog.org/
Excerpt from site:Though experts estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of untested kits in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the country, there is no comprehensive, national data on the nature and scope of the rape kit backlog. Few state governments and no federal agencies track this data. Across cities and counties, there are vast differences in the way law enforcement officials track and report rape kit data, if at all, making it exceedingly difficult to compare data and to have a national picture of the backlog.
Excerpt from commentary by Mariska Hargitay, founder of endthebacklog website:
As Polly Poskin, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, has said, "If you've got stacks of physical evidence of a crime, and you're not doing everything you can with the evidence, then you must be making a decision that this isn't a very serious crime." Beyond the obvious threat to public safety, beyond the wasted opportunities to both prosecute the guilty and exonerate the wrongly convicted, the backlog sends a devastating and inexcusable message to survivors: y byYou don't matter. What happened to you doesn't matter.0 -
So, here’s where I’m probably a bad feminist. When it comes to rape and rape kits specifically, it is my understanding that prescribing or at least offering emergency contraceptives is part of the exam process, so how is this forcing a woman to continue a possible pregnancy?
I do absolutely agree that there should be no backlogs. If states can find money for things like vaccine incentives or additional unemployment, they can certainly address this too. If the backlog is due to staff issues, then perhaps they need to hire more people I’d send the kits to other labs, I think we’d all rather have a backlog of 23&me kits.
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I have read that the rape victim may be informed about the emergency contraceptive pill but it is not handed out. It would be up to the victim to access it, Some hospitals with religious affiliation as well as pharmacists have been known to refuse to give the pill. I do not have any first hand or even indirect experience (like knowing someone who is went through this), this is what I’ve gleaned through articles and reports I’ve read. It’s estimated that between 17,000-32,000 people become pregnant through rape each year in the U.S. Texas. What a tragic statistic! Gov. Abbott said rape is against the law and he will eliminate it. I’m assuming he means in his own state, not quite sure how he plans to tackle such a huge issue. Or why he waited until an abortion law was passed before addressing the matter. The additional tragedy is anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 rapes against women occur in the U.S. a year. That makes my heart ache. It’s an epidemic.
illimae, my state of Ohio has its own issues, but I still love it for many reasons, and you probably feel the same about Texas, and I just wanted you to know my comments on its governor and its laws aren’t personal towards you.
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No worries Divine, I didn’t take it personally. I would agree that if likely depends on the religious affiliation of the hospital and I too only know what I read. But, I will say that I had to use plan b once and it was as easier than getting pain killers. While we may not remember if we are “late” or not, we do usually know if we’ve had unprotected sex.
I think it would make more of an impact on pro-lifers to focus on realistic prevention since all they see or chose to see is killing babies. I don’t know the answer but I am equally frustrated that Abbott changed a law that was not a problem for most womenas far as I know.
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Oh, it's easy to eliminate rape. Unfortunately, it involves changing the definition of rape, not prosecuting rapists. It was someone you knew? Well, that's just sex, not rape. It was a family member? That's incest, not rape. It was your husband? That's your wifely duty, not rape. You were unconscious? You shouldn't have let yourself go unconscious, so you didn't protect your ability to say "no", so not rape. You were wearing party clothes? You mean, fuck-me-clothes? Not rape. You were grabbed off the street, pushed into a van, driven outside of town, and left to die? Why didn't you carry pepper spray or learn krav maga? Not rape.
Basically taking every advancement in women's sexual autonomy backwards instantly reduces rape and exonerates rapists.
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Whoa, Miriandra! What a powerful post! Yes, society wants to place blame on the rape victim, twist the narrative. It is so beyond time for this to stop.
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Latte, last year I read a story on the same study that you mentioned in your post a page back:
The following is an article detailing an extensive study of women with unwanted pregnancies who aborted or did not. I hope those who come to this thread will take time to read it. Often main stream media as well as people in our community and certainly different religions try to push the narrative that all women regret having abortions.
That's not true.
The study found that rather than harming women, it helped them in measurable ways. The article goes on to explain how.
It concludes with a statement I totally agree with, that government should not be making laws based on guessing what an individual might feel in the future for actions taken now: “the fundamental principle of human autonomy (is that) people have to be able to make their own decisions in matters that…affect their own bodies and the course of their lives. Regret and ambivalence…are inextricable facts of life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the extent to which individuals may feel such emotions, hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for legislative bans and restrictions.“
Here is the link to the New Yorker story if you prefer to read it on their website: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-study-that-debunks-most-anti-abortion-arguments
The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments
For five years, a team of researchers asked women about their experience after having—or not having—an abortion. What do their answers tell us?
By Margaret Talbot
July 7, 2020
There is a kind of social experiment you might think of as a What if? study. It would start with people who are similar in certain basic demographic ways and who are standing at the same significant fork in the road. Researchers could not assign participants to take one path or another—that would be wildly unethical. But let's say that some more or less arbitrary rule in the world did the assigning for them. In such circumstances, researchers could follow the resulting two groups of people over time, sliding-doors style, to see how their lives panned out differently. It would be like speculative fiction, only true, and with statistical significance.
A remarkable piece of research called the Turnaway Study, which began in 2007, is essentially that sort of experiment. Over three years, a team of researchers, led by a demographer named Diana Greene Foster, at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 1,132 women from the waiting rooms of thirty abortion clinics in twenty-one states. Some of the women would go on to have abortions, but others would be turned away, because they had missed the fetal gestational limit set by the clinic. Foster and her colleagues decided to compare the women in the two groups—those who received the abortion they sought and those who were compelled to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term—on a variety of measures over time, interviewing them twice a year for up to five years.
The study is important, in part, because of its ingenious design. It included only women whose pregnancies were unwanted enough that they were actively seeking an abortion, which meant the researchers were not making the mistake that some previous studies of unplanned conceptions had—"lumping the happy surprises in with the total disasters," as Foster puts it. In terms of age, race, income level, and health status, the two groups of women closely resembled each other, as well as abortion patients nationwide. (Foster refers to the study's participants as women because, to her knowledge, there were no trans men or non-binary people among them.) Seventy per cent of the women who were denied abortions at the first clinic where they sought them carried the unwanted pregnancies to term. Others miscarried or were able to obtain late abortions elsewhere, and Foster and her colleagues followed the trajectories of those in the latter group as well.
While you might guess that those who were turned away had messier lives—after all, they were getting to the clinic later than the seemingly more proactive women who made the deadline—that did not turn out to be the case. Some of the women who got their abortions (half of the total participants) did so just under the wire; among the women in the study who were denied abortions (a quarter of the total), some had missed the limit by a matter of only a few days. (The remaining quarter terminated their pregnancies in the first trimester, which is when ninety per cent of abortions in the United States occur.) The women who were denied abortions were on average more likely to live below the poverty line than the women who managed to get them. (One of the main reasons that people seek abortions later in pregnancy is the need to raise money to pay for the procedure and for travel expenses.) But, in general, Foster writes, the two groups "were remarkably similar at the first interview. Their lives diverged thereafter in ways that were directly attributable to whether they received an abortion."
Over the past several years, findings from the Turnaway Study have come out in scholarly journals and, on a few occasions, gotten splashy media coverage. Now Foster has published a patiently expository precis of all the findings in a new book, "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion." The over-all impression it leaves is that abortion, far from harming most women, helps them in measurable ways. Moreover, when people assess what will happen in their lives if they have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, they are quite often proven right.
That might seem like an obvious point, but much of contemporary anti-abortion legislation is predicated on the idea that competent adults can't really know what's at stake in deciding whether to bear a child or not. Instead, they must be subjected to waiting periods to think it over (as though they can't be trusted to have done so already), presented with (often misleading) information about the supposed medical risks and emotional fallout of the procedure, and obliged to look at ultrasounds of the embryo or fetus.
And such scans are often framed, with breathtaking disingenuousness, as a right extended to people—what the legal scholar Carol Sanger calls "the right to be persuaded against exercising the right you came in with."
Maybe the first and most fundamental question for a study like this to consider is how women feel afterward about their decisions to have an abortion. In the Turnaway Study, over ninety-five per cent of the women who received an abortion and did an interview five years out said that it had been the right choice for them. It's possible that the women who remained in the study that long were disproportionately inclined to see things that way—maybe if you were feeling shame or remorse about an abortion you'd be less up for talking about it every six months in a phone interview with a researcher. (Foster suggests that people experiencing regrets might actually be more inclined to participate, but, to me, the first scenario makes more psychological sense.) Still, ninety-five per cent is a striking figure. And it's especially salient, again, in light of anti-choice arguments, which often stress the notion that many of the quarter to third of all American women who have an abortion will be wracked with guilt about their decision. (That's an awful lot of abject contrition.) You can pick at the study for its retention rate—and some critics, particularly on the anti-abortion side, have. Nine hundred and fifty-six of the original thousand-plus women who were recruited did the first interview. Fifty-eight per cent of them did the final interview. But, as Foster pointed out in an e-mail to me, on average, the women in the study completed an impressive 8.4 of the eleven interviews, and some of the data in the study—death records and credit reports—cover all 1,132 women who were originally enrolled.
To the former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among others, it seemed "unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." In a 2007 abortion-case ruling, he wrote that "severe depression and loss of esteem can follow." It can, but the epidemiologists, psychologists, statisticians, and other researchers who evaluated the Turnaway Study found it was not likely. "Some events do cause lifetime damage"—childhood abuse is one of them—"but abortion is not common among these," Foster writes. In the short term, the women who were denied abortions had worse mental health—higher anxiety and lower self-esteem. In the longer run, the researchers found "no long-term differences between women who receive and women who are denied an abortion in depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-esteem, life satisfaction, drug abuse, or alcohol abuse." Abortion didn't weigh heavily in determining mental health one way or the other. Foster and her co-authors note, in an earlier article, that "relief remained the most commonly felt emotion" among women who got the abortions they sought. That relief persisted, but its intensity dissipated over time.
Other positive impacts were more lasting. Women in the study who received the abortion they sought were more likely to be in a relationship they described as "very good." (After two years, the figure was forty-seven per cent, vs. twenty-eight per cent for the women turned away.) If they had been involved with a physically abusive man at the time of the unwanted pregnancy, they were less likely to still be experiencing violence, for the simple reason that they were less likely to be in contact with him. (Several of the participants interviewed for the book talk about not wanting to be tethered to a terrible partner by having a child together.) Women who got the abortion were more likely to become pregnant intentionally in the next five years than women who did not. They were less likely to be on public assistance and to report that they did not have enough money to pay for food, housing, and transportation. When they had children at home already, those children were less likely to be living in poverty. Based on self-reports, their physical health was somewhat better. Two of the women in the study who were denied abortions died from childbirth-related complications; none of the women who received abortions died as a result. That is in keeping with other data attesting to the general safety of abortion. One of Foster's colleagues, Ushma Upadhyay, analyzed complications after abortions in California's state Medicaid program, for example, and found that they occurred in two per cent of the cases—a lower percentage than for wisdom-tooth extraction (seven per cent) and certainly for childbirth (twenty-nine per cent). Indeed, maternal mortality has been rising in the U.S.—it's now more than twice as high as it was in 1987, and has risen even more steeply for Black women, due, in part, to racial disparities in prenatal care and the quality of hospitals where women deliver.
Yet, as Foster points out, many of the new state laws restricting abortion suggest that it is a uniquely dangerous procedure, one for which layers of regulation must be concocted, allegedly to protect women. The Louisiana law that the Supreme Court struck down last Monday imposed just such a rule—namely, a requirement that doctors performing abortions hold admitting privileges at a hospital no more than thirty miles away. As Justice Stephen Breyer's majority opinion noted, "The evidence shows, among other things, that the fact that hospital admissions for abortion are vanishingly rare means that, unless they also maintain active OB/GYN practices, abortion providers in Louisiana are unlikely to have any recent in-hospital experience." Since hospitals often require such experience in order to issue admitting privileges, abortion providers would be caught in a Catch-22, unable to obtain the privileges because, on actual medical grounds, they didn't need them. The result of such a law, had it gone into effect, would have been exactly what was intended: a drastic reduction in the number of doctors legally offering abortions in the state.
The Turnaway Study's findings are welcome ones for anyone who supports reproductive justice. But they shouldn't be necessary for it. The overwhelming majority of women who received abortions and stayed in the study for the full five years did not regret their decision. But the vast majority of women who'd been denied abortions reported that they no longer wished that they'd been able to end the pregnancy, after an actual child of four or five was in the world. And that's good, too—you'd hope they would love that child wholeheartedly, and you'd root for their resilience and happiness.
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human autonomy: people have to be able to make their own decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately affect their own bodies and the course of their lives. Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the extent to which individuals may feel such emotions, hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for legislative bans and restrictions.
The Turnaway Study will be understood, criticized, and used politically, however carefully conceived and painstakingly executed the research was. Given that inevitability, it's worth underlining the most helpful political work that the study does. In light of its findings, the rationale for so many recent abortion restrictions—namely, that abortion is uniquely harmful to the people who choose it—simply topples.
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I'm adding Latte's article as it gives another perspective of the study:
How abortion restrictions like Texas' push pregnant people into poverty
A study of hundreds of pregnant women over a decade found that 72 percent of those who were denied care ended up living in poverty.September 7, 2021, 1:57 p.m. ET
For the better part of a decade, Diana Greene Foster followed 1,000 women who were seeking an abortion. One group received the care, and the other was denied it: The pregnancies were too far along. As Foster watched Texas become the first state to have a six-week abortion ban go into effect last week, she thought of what she now knows are the myriad repercussions of that decision.
Foster's study, one of the most comprehensive on the real-life consequences of denied abortion access, showed that beyond the mental and physical health outcomes, economic wellbeing also plummets when people can't access abortion care.
"I think the people who passed this law did not consider the harm they are doing to women and their families," Foster said. "It is just such a massive intrusion into people's lives and it has real consequences."
About half of people who get an abortion live below the federal poverty level, and the majority of the women who took part in the research, known as the Turnaway Study, were low wage at the start. (No nonbinary people or trans men took part in the study, and there is very limited data on outcomes for the LGBTQ+ community.) The consequences of being denied an abortion plunged those women deeper into poverty, said Foster, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of California San Francisco.
Her work has led to a deeper understanding of the implications of restricting the ability to make critical health decisions and has put into sharper focus the potential ripple effect of a Texas ban that began last week that will effectively bar pregnant people from the procedure.
In Foster's study, the "economic trajectories" of the two groups diverged when the babies were born. The hardships for those people who did not get an abortion "last for years," Foster told The 19th.
According to the study, the group of women who were denied care fell deeper below the federal poverty line, taking four years to catch up to the levels of employment of the women who received an abortion. About 72 percent of the women who did not receive an abortion ended up living in poverty, compared with 55 percent of those who did.
A study of the women's credit reports, released last year, found a 78 percent increase in the amount of debt that was a month or more past due after the women gave birth and an increase of 81 percent in reports of bankruptcy, evictions and tax liens for that group.
Over the years that she worked on the study, Foster said, she learned how abortion can affect entire families. Many of the participants who did not receive abortions said financial hardship was one of the main reasons they didn't want to continue their pregnancies. They didn't want to give birth to a child they couldn't financially support, or they had other children already and wanted to ensure they could provide for them.
The unwanted pregnancy, and the inability to end it, nearly ensured that those women, their partners and their children lived in poverty. Children who live in poverty have worse health and educational outcomes, and they are more likely to live in poverty when they are adults.
And that's not because they aren't attempting to improve their lives, Foster noted, but because systemic policies make it harder for people of color, in particular, to gain upward economic mobility.
"It's not a passive thing, and when the state intervenes to prevent them from achieving their goals, there are real bad outcomes — bad outcomes that last years," Foster said. "It's just not possible that emotional resilience can make up for a lack of food on the table."
The passage of the Texas law, which other states are considering replicating,comes as economic outcomes are already depressed for women of color, who have experienced the deepest levels of unemployment during the pandemic recession.
The women's recession of the past year and a half is related to the fact that women are overrepresented in lower-paying jobs. Because of decades of occupational segregation, women make up the majority of care, retail and hospitality workers, making them the most likely to lose jobs when coronavirus closures began in 2020. Then, a lack of federal investment in child care caused thousands of centers to close, and, absent additional workplace policies to support parents, moms took on the majority of the care in the home. Hundreds of thousands quit their jobs. In September 2020 alone, 865,000 women left the labor force — four times the number of men.
The recession has had a disproportionate impact on women of color. Month after month, Latinas and Black women have lagged far behind White women in returning to the labor force. And although data on LGBTQ+ people is more limited, it is clear they have also suffered economically during the pandemic and continue to do so, even as businesses have reopened.
Layered on top of that now is the effective end of abortion access in Texas.
C. Nicole Mason, the president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, said restrictions like the one in Texas will cause people to spend more money trying to obtain an abortion out of state, and if they are unable to, potentially reduce their work hours in the face of lack of access to child care once their babies are born.
About 95 percent of the lowest paid workers in the United States — most of them women — don't have access to paid family leave. The average annual cost of child care is higher than the cost of in-state college tuition in 33 states and Washington, D.C.
Black women, especially, have been at the intersection of many of those disparities. They are more than twice as likely as White women to work in service occupations and make up 37 percent of the home care workforce — all jobs paying little more than minimum wage with very limited access to paid leave. Black women have also endured a year and a half of dual pandemics — coronavirus and a reckoning on systemic racism.
"Then on top of that you have policies and practices that not only limit women's reproductive rights and autonomy but make it a crime — criminalize it," Mason said. "It does feel very assaultive [for Black women], particularly, in this moment."
The Texas ban includes a clause that allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to be "aiding and abetting" a person receiving an abortion beyond the six-week mark.
Past studies of states that have added abortion restrictions that have led to clinic closures have found that they can lead to reductions of as much as 11 percent in Black women's college completion and drops of as much as 6 percent in future income. Already, it's clear the ban in Texas could close clinics across the state as the number of patients who can be served declines.
Restriction to abortion access has a chilling effect on people's ability to create long-term financial plans, said Kate Bahn, the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
"It's not even whether you have a child or not, but whether you have that certainty that you can have control over that decision," Bahn said. "It's exacerbating this trend of when you don't know where you're going, it is harder for you to make the types of career investments or education investments that would help upward economic mobility."
The implications are so severe that the Department of Labor is also closely monitoring Texas' law. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh told The 19th that the Texas law was a concern for his department because it could have "deeper" and "dangerous" ramifications on employment and on people's health.
It could also impact whole economies.
Data by the Institute for Women's Policy Research found that state-level abortion restrictions cost state economies $105 billion a year in lost labor force participation, time off work, earnings and increased turnover.
For Texas, that's an estimated loss of nearly $15 billion a year.
Mason said it was ironic to be considering those economic ramifications in a year where the federal government has been as close as it's ever been to passing historic protections for pregnant workers in the workplace, universal paid sick and family leave, and universal pre-kindergarten.
"In some ways we are moving in the right direction," Mason said. "And then, on the other hand, you have people who have been trying to chip away at the fundamental right for a woman to choose what's best for her family and herself. You get this moment where those things collide and seem contradictory and at odds."
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Divine, that’s some very interesting information on the study and confirms what I know from two friends who’ve had abortions, both went on to good relationships and married, one had children with her spouse, one didn’t, neither regret the decision.
I didn’t realize that waiting was often about affordability, I assumed it was struggling with the decision itself. If you can’t afford an abortion, how do you afford a baby? I think this needs to be addressed as well, as I firmly believe that so much of societal and criminal issues come from poverty.
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Yes the bottom line is, poverty is a very big factor in a majority of abortions.
This is from the Guttmacher institute, a 2014 study, but I’m sure still relevant -
“In 2014, three-fourths of abortion patients were low income—49% living at less than the federal poverty level, and 26% living at 100–199% of the poverty level.“
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014
“The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%);“
Also -“In 2014, the majority of abortion patients (60%) were in their 20s, and the second-largest age-group was in their 30s (25%).
• The proportion of abortion patients who were adolescents declined 32% between 2008 and 2014.““The percentage of abortion patients accounted for by adolescents has been declining for decades,29 but the 32% drop between 2008 and 2014 was particularly notable. A comparable drop was seen in the teenage birthrate, which declined 40% during this period,30,31 meaning that fewer teenagers were getting pregnant in 2014 than in 2008. There were no significant changes in sexual activity or contraceptive use patterns among adolescents during this time period,32 and economists speculate that increased educational opportunities, the media and the economy may have influenced these trends.33 Understanding the reasons behind these declines could have important policy implications, and more research is needed to better understand the range of factors influencing these patterns.“
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014
So I’m not sure how much more education is needed. The number of abortions among teenagers has decreased significantly. Does show that some support and a fairer economic system for women and families could be helpful (understatement).0 -
About the Texas law, I really did not know the details of either the law or the Supreme Court decision, other than the uproar about both.
I did a little bit of reading on it and the law itself does seem to be an attempt to do an end run around Roe.
We can’t criminalize it, so we’ll turn it into a civil matter between two parties who are not the state? Seems shady.
As to the Supreme Court decision, I gather that they rejected the case because the parties did not have standing. No one has actually been injured by the law yet, that has to happen first before anyone can challenge the law. So, the case can be brought again when that happens.
That doesn’t mean the Texas law has been found constitutional. To have the case rejected for lack of standing is frustrating and expensive, but it does happen. This is not unique to just this case and maybe not a “political “ decision by the court as some people are portraying it.
Now, my disclaimer, I just did a quick read and could have some of the details wrong. I’m totally open to having my facts corrected : )
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