abortion benefits essay

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Four Ways Access to Abortion Improves Women’s Well-Being

Last month, the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade , taking away a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. Already, several states have used that ruling to enact state laws banning abortion. In some cases, receiving an abortion or providing one, even in cases of rape or incest, is a crime punishable by imprisonment or hefty fines.

Though people may argue over whether this ruling is sound or not, it likely spells disaster for women’s health and well-being. That’s because research suggests women who have the right to choose whether or not to give birth are happier, healthier, and more economically stable than those who don’t. And their children benefit, too, by having a mother who can afford to nurture and provide for them better.

How do we know this? Mostly from data coming out of the “ Turnaway Study ”—a long-term, prospective study that followed hundreds of women seeking abortions at different clinics around the country who were either given an abortion or denied one (because of gestation limits for an abortion). By comparing the well-being of these women—who except for receiving an abortion or not were very similar to one another—researchers could more accurately assess the impacts of losing abortion rights.

Here are some of the findings from that important study (and others) about the benefits of receiving an abortion when you want one.


1. Better mental health


Many women are made to feel guilty about seeking an abortion; at times, the circumstances surrounding their choice can involve stress and negative emotions. Does getting the abortion hurt their mental health? Not in most cases. In general, women who get a desired abortion tend to have better mental health—even in the short term—than their peers who are denied one.


In one study , researchers compared women who received an abortion to those who were turned away and found that they had less anxiety, higher self-esteem, and greater life satisfaction one week post-abortion. As time went on, the two groups converged and both fared similarly in terms of their psychological well-being. But it’s clear that getting an abortion had no ill effects, and provided some short-term advantages, for a woman’s mental health.

In another study , researchers looked at the psychological well-being of first-time parents and found no evidence that having had an abortion negatively impacted a woman’s mental health or that it affected her sense of efficacy in raising her children. On the other hand, women who gave birth to an unwanted child (before Roe v. Wade allowed women to have legal abortions) were shown to be more depressed in middle age than women who’d had a wanted childbirth, planned or otherwise.

Of course, that’s not to say that women never suffer emotionally when having an abortion. Someone who really wants to be a mother, but is making the decision to end her pregnancy for economic or health reasons, would likely feel grief.

However, the research to date shows that there is no inherent psychological downside of getting an abortion if you want one—while the opposite may be true for being denied one. That is why the American Psychological Association issued a statement against the court’s ruling.

2. Better physical health

While some have argued that abortions have health risks, those pale in comparison to giving birth. Legal, medically supervised abortions are relatively safe for women. If we don’t keep them that way, women may seek to abort unwanted pregnancies on their own, putting themselves at greater risk for health complications.

One study found that women who wanted an abortion and were able to get one had better overall health five years later than a comparison group of women who were denied an abortion. About 20% of them reported that their health was only fair or poor compared to 27% of women giving birth, and they had fewer chronic headaches, migraines, and joint pain, too. As demographers estimate , a ban on abortions will likely have dire consequences for a large number of women, with the poor and less educated suffering most.

3. More economic stability and less poverty

The two most common reasons women choose to get an abortion are economic instability (they can’t afford to care for a child right now) and poor timing (it might interfere with their educational or career goals). Given that, it makes sense that women who can get an abortion may have better incomes and more stability in their lives. Research bears this out.

As one study showed, having a child later in adulthood substantially increases earned wages for women, especially if they’re college-educated. But the ability of a woman to choose to delay motherhood is affected by whether or not she can obtain an abortion if she wants one, obviously—which suggests that women who have access to abortions also have an economic advantage.

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The negative effects of not having reproductive freedom were supported by a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In the study, researchers found that “women who were denied an abortion experience a large increase in financial distress that is sustained for several years.” Some of the economic fallout of being denied an abortion included an increased risk of lingering debt, evictions, bankruptcies, and poor credit ratings.

This means women who received an abortion fared better economically and were better able to stay out of poverty, not only helping themselves, but their other children , as well.

4. Women with access to abortions have healthier children

When a woman has access to an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, she is better able to care for the other children she has (or eventually has).

In one study published in JAMA Pediatrics , researchers compared babies born to a woman denied an abortion (called an “index” baby) to babies born to a woman after she was able to procure an abortion for an earlier pregnancy (“subsequent” babies). Findings showed that mothers were less able to bond with index children than with subsequent children.

In addition, studies found that the existing children of a woman seeking an abortion fared better developmentally six months to 4.5 years later if the woman was given (versus denied) an abortion. This means that the children living with a less-stressed mother demonstrated some combination of better fine motor, gross motor, receptive language, expressive language, self-soothing, and social-emotional skills than children born to a woman denied an abortion. The children were also less likely to live below the poverty line.

Of course, some of these benefits of having access to abortion would be even more pronounced if we lived in a country where there was support for a woman’s right to choose their own reproductive destiny. When countries have better access to abortion, maternal deaths decline , which certainly benefits those women’s children, while abortion rates do not change much (or may even be higher) if abortion is illegal.

If the United States truly wants to protect women and their children, research suggests that they should look to countries whose governments provide universal social welfare programs that benefit families—things like free, widely available prenatal care, health care, parental leave, and child care for working mothers, regardless of their ability to pay. If we had similar policies here, it might not only help those children who are wanted, but also help those who aren’t.

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

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By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

By Margaret Talbot

What can economic research tell us about the effect of abortion access on women’s lives?

Subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, caitlin knowles myers and caitlin knowles myers john g. mccullough professor of economics; co-director, middlebury initiative for data and digital methods - middlebury college @caitlin_k_myers morgan welch morgan welch senior research assistant & project coordinator - center on children and families, economic studies, brookings institution.

November 30, 2021

• 21 min read

On September 20, 2021, a group of 154 distinguished economists and researchers filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in advance of the Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization . For a full review of the evidence that shows how causal inference tools have been used to measure the effects of abortion access in the U.S., read the brief here .

Introduction

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization considers the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that prohibits women from accessing abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This case is widely expected to determine the fate of Roe v. Wade as Mississippi is directly challenging the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Roe , which protects abortion access before fetal viability (typically between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy). On December 1, 2021, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson . In asking the Court to overturn Roe , the state of Mississippi offers reassurances that “there is simply no causal link between the availability of abortion and the capacity of women to act in society” 1 and hence no reason to believe that abortion access has shaped “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation” 2 as the Court had previously held.

While the debate over abortion often centers on largely intractable subjective questions of ethics and morality, in this instance the Court is being asked to consider an objective question about the causal effects of abortion access on the lives of women and their families. The field of economics affords insights into these objective questions through the application of sophisticated methodological approaches that can be used to isolate and measure the causal effects of abortion access on reproductive, social, and economic outcomes for women and their families.

Separating Correlation from Causation: The “Credibility Revolution” in Economics

To measure the causal effect of abortion on women’s lives, one must differentiate its effects from those of other forces, such as economic opportunity, social mores, the availability of contraception. Powerful statistical methodologies in the causal inference toolbox have made it possible for economists to do just that, moving beyond the maxim “correlation isn’t necessarily causation” and applying the scientific method to figure out when it is.

This year’s decision by the Economic Sciences Prize Committee recognized the contributions 3 of economists David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens, awarding them the Nobel Prize for their pathbreaking work developing and applying the tools of causal inference in a movement dubbed “the credibility revolution” (Angrist and Pischke, 2010). The gold standard for establishing such credibility is a well-executed randomized controlled trial – an experiment conducted in the lab or field in which treatment is randomly assigned. When economists can feasibly and ethically implement such experiments, they do. However, in the social world, this opportunity is often not available. For instance, one cannot feasibly or ethically randomly assign abortion access to some individuals but not others. Faced with this obstacle, economists turn to “natural” or “quasi” experimental methods, ones in which they are able to credibly argue that treatment is as good as randomly assigned.

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Pioneering applications of this approach include work by Angrist and Krueger (1991) leveraging variation in compulsory school attendance laws to measure the effects of schooling on earnings and work by Card and Krueger (1994) leveraging minimum wage variation across state borders to measure the effects of the minimum wages on employment outcomes. The use of these methods is now widespread, not just in economics, but in other social sciences as well. Fueled by advances in computing technology and the availability of data, quasi-experimental methodologies have become as ubiquitous as they are powerful, applied to answer questions ranging from the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict (Miguel, Sayanath, and Sergenti, 2004), to the effects of the Clean Water Act on water pollution levels (Keiser and Shapiro, 2019), and effects of access to food stamps in childhood on later life outcomes (Hoynes, Schanzenbach, Almond 2016; Bailey et al., 2020).

Research demonstrates that abortion access does, in fact, profoundly affect women’s lives by determining whether, when, and under what circumstances they become mothers.

Economists also have applied these tools to study the causal effects of abortion access. Research drawing on methods from the “credibility revolution” disentangles the effects of abortion policy from other societal and economic forces. This research demonstrates that abortion access does, in fact, profoundly affect women’s lives by determining whether, when, and under what circumstances they become mothers, outcomes which then reverberate through their lives, affecting marriage patterns, educational attainment, labor force participation, and earnings.

The Effects of Abortion Access on Women’s Reproductive, Economic, and Social Lives

Evidence of the effects of abortion legalization.

The history of abortion legalization in the United States affords both a canonical and salient example of a natural experiment. While Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in most of the country in 1973, five states—Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington—and the District of Columbia repealed their abortion bans several years in advance of Roe . Using a methodology known as “difference-in-difference estimation,” researchers compared changes in outcomes in these “repeal states” when they lifted abortion bans to changes in outcomes in the rest of the country. They also compared changes in outcomes in the rest of the country in 1973 when Roe legalized abortion to changes in outcomes in the repeal states where abortion already was legal. This difference-in-differences methodology allows the states where abortion access is not changing to serve as a counterfactual or “control” group that accounts for other forces that were impacting fertility and women’s lives in the Roe era.

Among the first to employ this approach was a team of economists (Levine, Staiger, Kane, and Zimmerman, 1999) who estimated that the legalization of abortion in repeal states led to a 4% to 11% decline in births in those states relative to the rest of the country. Levine and his co-authors found that these fertility effects were particularly large for teens and women of color, who experienced birth rate reductions that were nearly three times greater than the overall population as a result of abortion legalization. Multiple research teams have replicated the essential finding that abortion legalization substantially impacted American fertility while extending the analysis to consider other outcomes. 4 For example, Myers (2017) found that abortion legalization reduced the number of women who became teen mothers by 34% and the number who became teen brides by 20%, and again observed effects that were even larger for Black teens. Farin, Hoehn-Velasco, and Pesko (2021) found that abortion legalization reduced maternal mortality among Black women by 30-40%, with little impact on white women, offering the explanation that where abortion was illegal, Black women were less likely to be able to access safe abortions by traveling to other states or countries or by obtaining a clandestine abortion from a trusted health care provider.

The ripple effects of abortion access on the lives of women and their families

This research, which clearly demonstrates the causal relationship between abortion access and first-order demographic and health outcomes, laid the foundation for researchers ­to measure further ripple effects through the lives of women and their families. Multiple teams of authors have extended the difference-in-differences research designs to study educational and labor market outcomes, finding that abortion legalization increased women’s education, labor force participation, occupational prestige, and earnings and that all these effects were particularly large for Black women (Angrist and Evans, 1996; Kalist, 2004; Lindo, Pineda-Torres, Pritchard, and Tajali, 2020; Jones, 2021).

Additionally, research shows that abortion access has not only had profound effects on women’s economic and social lives but has also impacted the circumstances into which children are born. Researchers using difference-in-differences research designs have found that abortion legalization reduced the number of children who were unwanted (Bitler and Zavodny, 2002a, reduced cases of child neglect and abuse (Bitler and Zavodny, 2002b; 2004), reduced the number of children who lived in poverty (Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, 1999), and improved long-run outcomes of an entire generation of children by increasing the likelihood of attending college and reducing the likelihood of living in poverty and receiving public assistance (Ananat, Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, 2009).

Access to abortion continues to be important to women’s lives

The research cited above relies on variation in abortion access from the 1970s, and much has changed in terms of both reproductive technologies and women’s lives. Recent research shows, however, that even with the social, economic, and legal shifts that have occurred over the last few decades and even with expanded access to contraception, abortion access remains relevant to women’s reproductive lives. Today, nearly half of pregnancies are unintended (Finer and Zolna, 2016). About 6% of young women (ages 15-34) experience an unintended pregnancy each year (Finer, Lindberg, and Desai, 2018), and about 1.4% of women of childbearing age obtain an abortion each year (Jones, Witwer, and Jerman, 2019). At these rates, approximately one in four women will receive an abortion in their reproductive lifetimes. The fact is clear: women continue to rely on abortion access to determine their reproductive lives.

But what about their economic and social lives? While women have made great progress in terms of their educational attainment, career trajectories, and role in society, mothers face a variety of challenges and penalties that are not adequately addressed by public policy. Following the birth of a child, it’s well documented that working mothers face a “motherhood wage penalty,” which entails lower wages than women who did not have a child (Waldfogel, 1998; Anderson, Binder, and Krause, 2002; Kelven et al., 2019). Maternity leave may combat this penalty as it allows women to return to their jobs following the birth of a child – encouraging them to remain attached to the labor force (Rossin-Slater, 2017). However, as of this writing, the U.S. only offers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave through the FMLA, which extends coverage to less than 60% of all workers. 5 And even if a mother is able to return to work, childcare in the U.S. is costly and often inaccessible for many. Families with infants can be expected to pay around $11,000 a year for childcare and subsidies are only available for 1 in 6 children that are eligible under the federal program. 6 Without a federal paid leave policy and access to affordable childcare, the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to adequately support mothers, and especially working mothers – making the prospect of motherhood financially unworkable for some.

This is relevant when considering that the women who seek abortions tend to be low-income mothers experiencing disruptive life events. In the most recent survey of abortion patients conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, 97% are adults, 49% are living below the poverty line, 59% already have children, and 55% are experiencing a disruptive life event such as losing a job, breaking up with a partner, or falling behind on rent (Jones and Jerman, 2017a and 2017b). It is not a stretch to imagine that access to abortion could be pivotal to these women’s financial lives, and recent evidence from “The Turnaway Study” 7 provides empirical support for this supposition. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of researchers follows two groups of women who were typically seeking abortions in the second trimester: one group that arrived at abortion clinics and learned they were just over the gestational age threshold for abortions and were “turned away” and a second that was just under the threshold and were provided an abortion. Miller, Wherry, and Foster (2020) match individuals in both groups to their Experian credit reports and observe that in the months leading up to the moment they sought an abortion, financial outcomes for both groups were trending similarly. At the moment one group is turned away from a wanted abortion, however, they began to experience substantial financial distress, exhibiting a 78% increase in past-due debt and an 81% increase in public records related to bankruptcies, evictions, and court judgments.

If Roe were overturned, the number of women experiencing substantial obstacles to obtaining an abortion would dramatically increase.

If Roe were overturned, the number of women experiencing substantial obstacles to obtaining an abortion would dramatically increase. Twelve states have enacted “trigger bans” designed to outlaw abortion in the immediate aftermath of a Roe reversal, while an additional 10 are considered highly likely to quickly enact new bans. 8 These bans would shutter abortion facilities across a wide swath of the American south and midwest, dramatically increasing travel distances and the logistical costs of obtaining an abortion. Economics research predicts what is likely to happen next. Multiple teams of economists have exploited natural experiments arising from mandatory waiting periods (Joyce and Kaestner, 2001; Lindo and Pineda-Torres, 2021; Myers, 2021) and provider closures (Quast, Gonzalez, and Ziemba, 2017; Fischer, Royer, and White, 2018; Lindo, Myers, Schlosser, and Cunningham, 2020; Venator and Fletcher, 2021; Myers, 2021). All have found that increases in travel distances prevent large numbers of women seeking abortions from reaching a provider and that most of these women give birth as a result. For instance, Lindo and co-authors (2020) exploit a natural experiment arising from the sudden closure of half of Texas’s abortion clinics in 2013 and find that an increase in travel distance from 0 to 100 miles results in a 25.8% decrease in abortions. Myers, Jones, and Upadhyay (2019) use these results to envision a post- Roe United States, forecasting that if Roe is overturned and the expected states begin to ban abortions, approximately 1/3 of women living in affected regions would be unable to reach an abortion provider, amounting to roughly 100,000 women in the first year alone.

Restricting, or outright eliminating, abortion access by overturning Roe v. Wade  would diminish women’s personal and economic lives, as well as the lives of their families.

Whether one’s stance on abortion access is driven by deeply held views on women’s bodily autonomy or when life begins, the decades of research using rigorous methods is clear: there is a causal link between access to abortion and whether, when, and under what circumstances women become mothers, with ripple effects throughout their lives. Access affects their education, earnings, careers, and the subsequent life outcomes for their children. In the state’s argument, Mississippi rejects the causal link between access to abortion and societal outcomes established by economists and states that the availability of abortion isn’t relevant to women’s full participation in society. Economists provide clear evidence that overturning Roe would prevent large numbers of women experiencing unintended pregnancies—many of whom are low-income and financially vulnerable mothers—from obtaining desired abortions. Restricting, or outright eliminating, that access by overturning Roe v. Wade would diminish women’s personal and economic lives, as well as the lives of their families.

Caitlin Knowles Myers did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article. She has received financial compensation from Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Center for Reproductive Rights for serving as an expert witness in litigation involving abortion regulations. She has not and will not receive financial compensation for her role in the amicus brief described here. Other than the aforementioned, she has not received financial support from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. Caitlin Knowles Myers is not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

Abboud, Ali, 2019. “The Impact of Early Fertility Shocks on Women’s Fertility and Labor Market Outcomes.” Available from SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3512913

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Ananat, Elizabeth Oltmans, Gruber, Jonathan, Levine, Phillip and Douglas Staiger, 2009. “Abortion and Selection.” The Review of Economic Statistics 91(1). Retrieved from https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/91/1/124/57736/Abortion-and-Selection?redirectedFrom=fulltext .

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Bailey, Martha J., Hoynes, Hilary W., Rossin-Slater, Maya and Reed Walker, 2020. “Is the Social Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? Large-Scale Evidence from the Food Stamps Program” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 26942 , Retrieved from https://www.nber.org/papers/w26942

Bitler, Marianne, and Madeline Zavodny, 2002a. “Did Abortion Legalization Reduce the Number of Unwanted Children? Evidence from Adoptions.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 34 (1): 25-33. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3030229?origin=JSTOR-pdf

Bitler, Marianne, and Madeline Zavodny, 2002b. “Child Abuse and Abortion Availability.” American Economic Review , 92 (2): 363-367. Retrieved from https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/000282802320191624

Bitler, Marianne, and Madeline Zavodny, 2004. “Child Maltreatment, Abortion Availability, and Economic Conditions.” Review of Economics of the Household 2: 119-141. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1023/B:REHO.0000031610.36468.0e

Farin, Sherajum Monira, Hoehn-Velasco, Lauren, and Michael Pesko, 2021. “The Impact of Legal Abortion on Maternal Health: Looking to the Past to Inform the Present.” Retrieved from SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3913899

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Gruber, Jonathan, Levine, Phillip, and Douglas Staiger, 1999. “Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who Is the ‘Marginal Child’?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1162/003355399556007

Guldi, Melanie, 2008. “Fertility effects of abortion and birth control pill access for minors.” Demography 45 . Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0026

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Jones, Kelly, 2021. “At a Crossroads: The Impact of Abortion Access on Future Economic Outcomes.” American University Working Paper . Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17606/0Q51-0R11 .

Jones, Rachel K., Witwer, Elizabeth, Jerman, Jenna, September 18, 2018. “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2017.” Guttmacher Institute. Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/ default/files/report_pdf/abortion-inciden ce-service-availability-us-2017.

Jones Rachel K., and Janna Jerman, 2017a. ”Population group abortion rates and lifetime incidence of abortion: United States, 2008–2014.”  American Journal of Public Health 107 (12). Retrieved from https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304042

Jones, Rachel K. and Jenna Jerman, 2017b. “Characteristics and Circumstances of U.S. Women Who Obtain Very Early and Second-Trimester Abortions.” PLoS One . Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28121999/

Joyce, Ted, and Robert Kaestner, 2001. “The Impact of Mandatory Waiting Periods and Parental Consent Laws on the Timing of Abortion and State of Occurrence among Adolescents in Mississippi and South Carolina.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 20(2) . Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3325799 .

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Lindo, Jason M., Myers, Caitlin Knowles, Schlosser, Andrea, and Scott Cunningham, 2020. “How Far Is Too Far? New Evidence on Abortion Clinic Closures, Access, and Abortions” Journal of Human Resources 55. Retrieved from http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/55/4/1137.refs

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Lindo, Jason M., and Mayra Pineda-Torres, 2021. “New Evidence on the Effects of Mandatory Waiting Periods for Abortion.” J ournal of Health Econ omics. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34607119/

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• Thomas E. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Brief in Support of Petitioners, No. 19-1392.
• Thomas E. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Brief for Petitioners, No. 19-139, Retrieved from https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/184703/20210722161332385_19-1392BriefForPetitioners.pdf
• The Nobel Prize. 2021. “Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 202.” Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/press-release/
• See Angrist and Evans (1996), Gruber et al. (1999), Ananat et al. (2009), Guldi (2008), Myers (2017), Abboud (2019), Jones (2021).
• Brown, Scott, Herr, Jane, Roy, Radha , and Jacob Alex Klerman, July 2020. “Employee and Worksite Perspectives of the FMLA Who Is Eligible?” U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved from https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OASP/evaluation/pdf/WHD_FMLA2018PB1WhoIsEligible_StudyBrief_Aug2020.pdf
• Whitehurst, Grover J., April 19, 2018. “What is the market price of daycare and preschool?” Brookings Institution. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-is-the-market-price-of-daycare-and-preschool/; Chien, Nina, 2021. “Factsheet: Estimates of Child Care Eligibility & Receipt for Fiscal Year 2018.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved from https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/20 21-08/cy-2018-child-care-subsidy-eligibility.pdf
• Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (NSIRH). “The Turnaway Study.” Retrieved from https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study.
• Center for Reproductive Rights, 2021. “What If Roe Fell?” Retrieved from https://maps.reproductiverights.org/what-if-roe-fell

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Vanessa Williamson

May 14, 2024

Simon Hodson

May 8, 2024

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Men Have a Lot to Lose When Roe Falls

By Andréa Becker

Dr. Becker is a medical sociologist.

Matt Lavallee was in college when he learned his girlfriend was pregnant. “The news scared me,” he said, acknowledging that an unintended pregnancy was an even more daunting prospect for his girlfriend. “But there was no question that abortion was the best option for us.”

Now in his 40s, he shares this abortion story whenever he can, including on social media. If his girlfriend had been unable to obtain that abortion, he believes, both of their lives would have been drastically affected. At the time, neither of them had stable jobs or housing, and finding the $400 for the abortion was a struggle.

“It’s easy for men to see this as someone else’s problem, but it’s not,” said Mr. Lavallee. “Without the right to abortion, all of our lives would be much worse. I am living proof.”

We don’t often hear abortion stories from cisgender men like Mr. Lavallee, even though they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s unplanned pregnancies, and so often benefit when an abortion occurs. The much more familiar pattern when efforts are made to curtail abortion is for a slew of mostly women to share their abortion stories .

Reproductive health science has likewise disproportionately focused on the people who have abortions. Other researchers and I have devoted our careers to examining not only who gets abortions but also what the experience is like, what barriers must be overcome and how having an abortion or being denied one alters a person’s life trajectory. This research has found that access to abortion is associated with improved physical and mental health and is correlated to higher educational and financial attainment in the long run for both women and their children.

Yet amid all this abortion research, some critical questions remain: What’s the effect on men when they co-conceive and then the pregnancy ends in abortion? And who even are these men?

The data on who gets an abortion is extensive . We know that about one in four U.S. women will have an abortion and that about 60 percent are in their 20s, about 75 percent are low income, about 62 percent are religious and around more than half are already parents.

By contrast, there’s scant data on how cis men benefit from abortions, let alone demographic data that characterizes this population. This is partly because of methodology concerns: A man might not necessarily know he helped cause an abortion. Moreover, amid continual attacks on abortion rights, the urgency among researchers has logically been to demonstrate the benefits of abortion access for those who can become pregnant.

Despite this gap in the literature, the data we do have on male abortion beneficiaries indicates that the benefits extend well beyond the person having the abortion. For instance, one study found that among men involved in a pregnancy before the age of 20, those whose partner had an abortion were more likely to have graduated from college compared with those whose partner gave birth.

Given the strong connection between education and income level , it’s plausible that male abortion beneficiaries experience increased income benefits over their lifetime as well, though there isn’t yet data to support this. So far, no such large quantitative study has been conducted on the benefits of abortion for men above the age of 20.

One of the few social scientists who has conducted research on adult men involved in abortions is Jennifer Reich, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Denver. “Everybody benefits when individuals can control their own reproduction, but the benefit can be invisible for cis men, since they don’t absorb the risks of pregnancy and it’s not written on their bodies,” said Dr. Reich.

In interviews she conducted for a 2008 study, men said abortion made it possible for them to continue their education or employment goals and to “evaluate whether this was the relationship they most wanted to have a lifelong connection to.” Dr. Reich also found that the 20 men in her sample had been involved in 30 abortions, which could suggest that a smaller number of men are involved in a larger proportion of abortions, further supporting the need to understand men’s role.

Dr. Brian T. Nguyen , an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California, has established the EMERGE lab to begin to fill the gaps in what’s known about men’s role in reproductive health care. His team has estimated that approximately one in five men has been involved in an abortion , which is likely an underestimate, as some men might misreport because of stigma or because they are unaware of an abortion. “Men can and should be involved in sexual and reproductive health care, and we’ll do this work until it becomes very clear that this is everyone’s issue,” he said.

In a forthcoming paper that draws on a survey data from over 200 men who have been involved in an abortion, Dr. Nguyen and his colleagues found that approximately half of the men surveyed said they desired the abortion so they could focus on the children they already had, which mirrors motivations reported by women who choose abortion that I’ve found in my research as well.

Still, such studies account for a tiny fraction of the existing research on abortion. The lack of focus on men’s role in abortion and how it affects them reflects a broader issue in the way society considers reproductive health.

“We spend so little time thinking about how men’s reproductive health matters and what men’s experiences of reproduction are,” said Rene Almeling, a professor of sociology at Yale.

Dr. Almeling has found that society’s vision of a man’s role in reproduction has come to be limited to “having sex and providing sperm.”

This dearth in knowledge reinforces ideas about reproductive health as an issue for women alone, which results in their shouldering all reproductive responsibility. In the case of abortion specifically, the lack of knowledge and cultural attention obfuscates the benefit that abortion access has for the partners of pregnant people as well.

According to Dr. Nguyen, the lack of focus on men’s involvement in reproductive health care may lead men to tune out the battle for abortion rights or even become opposed to them because they feel unheard or unwelcome in the conversation.

It’s easy to imagine the benefit of shifting some of the focus onto men’s role in abortion. However, there’s also an inherent tension around the question of what role men should have in abortion decisions. While the data we do have suggests that all parties benefit from having access to abortion, the pregnant partner solely carries the burden of the physical dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, which in the United States is 14 times as deadly as abortion and is particularly dangerous for Black women . “It is the person whose body can be or is pregnant who should be making any and all decisions,” said Dr. Almeling.

At the same time, shedding more light on the invisible benefits of abortion for men could be a powerful opportunity to combat stigma and bring more people into the fight for reproductive rights. After all, women have been telling their abortion stories for years, and Roe is still expected to fall .

Andréa Becker ( @andreavbecker ) is a medical sociologist, researcher and writer at the University of California, San Francisco, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health.

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May 5, 2022

Abortion Rights Are Good Health Care and Good Science

Restricting access to abortion goes against science, safety, and human dignity and portends a dangerous future

By The Editors

Abortion rights demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.

Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to make a huge mistake.

If the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a true indication of the Court’s will, federal abortion rights in this country are about to be struck down. In doing so the Court will not only side against popular opinion on a crucial issue of bodily autonomy, but also signal that politics and religion play a more important role in health care than do science and evidence.

For almost 50 years people in the U.S. who have needed to end a pregnancy have had a legal right to do so. Accessibility and affordability have always been barriers, and anti-abortion lawmakers have chipped away at this right, set forth in Roe v. Wade , but the ability to get a safe and legal abortion before fetal viability was settled law.

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The new decision would strike down Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , an opinion that overturned a Pennsylvania law that required a pregnant married woman to notify her husband in order to obtain abortion services. Many states, mainly governed by conservative lawmakers, have already passed or are planning to introduce laws that either ban abortion outright or put such severe restrictions on this medical procedure that it will be practically impossible to legally end a pregnancy. Some states will make criminals of doctors and other health care providers who perform abortions. Some laws set to go into effect after a Supreme Court ruling would deny people the right to end pregnancies that happen after rape or incest, or that pose grave medical dangers. These laws are contrary to all relevant science, and any health-related claims used to support them are demonstrably wrong.

In passing these laws, anti-abortion legislators often claim that abortion harms people who are pregnant. In a landmark study from the University of California, San Francisco, scientists found the opposite: d enying people abortions led to worse mental and physical health , as well as financial stability. The Turnaway Study looked at about 1,000 women who were seeking abortions, and followed them for five years. Some were just early enough in their pregnancies that they got the procedure, and others were turned away because their pregnancies were slightly past the legal cutoff where they lived. Women who had abortions reported fewer mental health issues, even years later, and their most common reaction was relief . Women denied abortions often experienced brief declines in mental health and higher anxiety.

Women denied abortions were more likely to end up poor, unemployed or receiving government assistance, even though before they asked for an abortion they were in a similar financial place as women who were able to get one. This study, and others, tell us what will happen in a post- Roe world , when people are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term because they are denied a most basic form of health care and the ability to make decisions about their own bodies. Access to abortion largely appears to have very positive effects on people’s lives.

The fight against abortion rights is often depicted as a religious mission, but not all religions or religious believers oppose abortion. We note that these political moves are part of a long-standing effort by some conservative Christians, as well as anti-abortion politicians and activists.

By forcing people to have children when they don’t want to, these ideologues strip women of political and earning power, in some cases making them dependent upon men. By forcing people to have children when they are not financially secure, these laws prolong patterns of poverty. And the states with the most restrictive abortion policies often have the worst social safety nets, the worst maternal mortality rates and the greatest health care inequities.

This ideology denies the dangers of pregnancy, despite the fact that in some U.S. states maternal mortality approaches that of some developing nations. Some of the abortion restrictions states have passed are pegged to an early stage of pregnancy. But the biological and genetic problems that lead to complications with pregnancy are too numerous to list, and too variable from person to person to assign a deadline to. Gestational age cutoffs, “heartbeat” laws and total bans go against the basic workings of human biology.

Regardless of how they legally justify their ruling, the justices of the Supreme Court who choose to strike down abortion rights are telling the American public that science doesn’t matter, that evidence can be ignored. High courts have similarly said as much in striking down mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID pandemic. The logic of Alito’s draft—the right to an abortion is not in the Constitution—could apply to all reproductive health, including the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that overturned a law banning birth control. The highest court in the land must value evidence and respect best medical practices, and yet the conservative majority clearly doesn’t.

President Joe Biden and other pro-choice elected officials have said they will work to protect abortion rights. There are legislative means to ensure some degree of abortion access. But with our current federal legislature and the filibuster in place, getting the needed votes to pass measures protecting abortion will be difficult, if not impossible. We hope lawmakers will see abortion rights as an issue that makes it necessary to break through legislative roadblocks.

As our Supreme Court is poised to radically constrain the lives of so many people in the U.S, we applaud those states that are strengthening their abortion protections. We applaud those people who are continuing to fight the legal and practical battles for our right to health care and our right to privacy. And we applaud the health care workers—the doctors, the nurses, the medical assistants—and the volunteers, donors and programs that help people who are pregnant care for themselves and their health. Safe and accessible reproductive health care is a basic right that is supported by science, medicine, and respect for human dignity. Everyone should have access to it.

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in Europe

Public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, what the data says about abortion in the u.s., most popular.

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Analysis of Advantages and Disadvantages of Abortion

Introduction, works cited.

Abortion remains one of the most controversial topics in the world. Many people believe that it is wrong and consider it to be murder, where a significant number support it but for specific reasons. Abortion provides one of the unending and disturbing American moral and legal struggles. The topic introduces many ethical dilemmas relating to the moral status of the fetus and the meaning of human life (Kirkey). Arguments about pregnancy termination concentration on the rights and wrongs of intentionally ending a pregnancy before the scheduled childbirth is resulting in the demise of the fetus. Abortion remains to be a painful topic for both women and men facing the dilemma of making ethical decisions relating to whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. People continue to question whether abortions are morally wrong and whether it should be legal or illegal. Moral disagreements among critics do not stop people from performing abortions, even in countries where it is illegal. This research discussion argues that abortion is seriously wrong except for some instances.

As noted above, abortion is morally wrong except for some circumstances. Many exceptions have been raised that allow abortion; for example, pregnancy resulting from rape and abortion in the first 14 days after conception in which people argue that the fetus has not matured to a person. Another exception includes cases where the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother as well as when the fetus is anencephalic. Many arguments discussion about abortion is considered to be intractable based on the symmetries that emerge from the scrutiny of the major arguments on either side. For example, critics argue that fetuses are both human and alive, and every human has the right to life. Hence, fetuses have the right to life, whereas women have the right to control their bodies. Nonetheless, the right to life for the fetuses overrides the right of a woman to control her body meaning than abortion is morally wrong.

Many medical and scientific developments have occurred since the United States Supreme Court provided a ruling about the Roe v Wade in 1973. This case has significant implications on the future of abortion (Lipka, and Gramlich). One of the major developments has been the rise of the neonatal intensive care and the subsequent lowering of the time of fetal viability. There has also been increased utilization of the sonogram and growing concerns for the link between fetal health and women’s occupational health. The case has facilitated many medical changes and legal developments that concentrate on the assessment of the fetus rather than the rights of women. Abortion is a complex issue that has raised many controversies in the country. Recent studies point at different reasons for keeping abortion legal in the United States. For example, prohibiting it could result in high rates of illegal abortion throughout the country. Therefore, there is an increased need for open discussion regarding the moral nature of abortion decisions and recognition not conferred as moral wisdom by constitutional freedom.

Before the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Roe. Wade , abortion was illegal in 46 states; 16 states had laws identical to the requirements of the Model Penal Code. Such laws allow abortion if necessary, to ensure women’s life and health are protected. The Model Penal Code also allows abortion if a fetus would be born with a grave physical or mental defect or if the pregnancy results from rape or incest. Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, 32 states forbidden abortion except when it would save a woman’s life. The supreme court failed to uphold some of these state laws; for example, it did not defend state laws that prohibit abortion on the grounds that the fetus is a live human being.

There are many arguments for and against abortion; for example, some people argue that women have the right to choose since it is their body. Abortions are not an easy decision for women, and it should be solely a woman’s choice, not the pressure of lawmakers. These women understand their situations and therefore are better suited for making such decisions. Opponents of abortion base their arguments on the right to life. The counter women’s right to chose by arguing that the fetus has the right to life. They claim that both the life of the mother and the unborn child are equal, and thus the life of the unborn child should be considered before terminating a pregnancy. Hence, the argument towards the right to life and the right to chose presents two sides about abortion in an attempt to explain whether it should be legal or illegal.

Banning abortion is regarded as condemning women to death, but those opposed to abortion argue that there are other options. Recent studies indicate that every 11 minutes, a female dies from problems linked with insecure or risky pregnancy termination from globally. It means that making abortion illegal does not reduce the total number of pregnancy termination; rather, it increases the number of illegal and unsafe abortions. On the other side, critics opposed to abortion propose other options that they consider to be better (Chavez). They argue that an unwanted pregnancy does not mean being forced to raise the child, especially if you are unable to support the child. They propose better options, such as foster care or adoption of the child. Recent studies indicate that many developed countries have social services that can place a child with suitable foster parents allowing the mother time to think regarding whether to keep the infant. Hence, though many people are against making abortion illegal, there are better options that women can focus on instead of terminating a pregnancy.

Some groups argue that legalizing abortion does not necessarily mean more miscarriages. Abortions are legal in many countries, such as Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. The countries often record lower rates of abortion as compared to those nations where abortion is illegal. Countries that prohibit abortion heavily restrict access to contraceptives and sex education. Therefore, abortion represents one option alongside many family planning measures but should be performed safely and legally as well as on rare occasions. On the other side, some people argue that legalizing abortion is immoral based on religious grounds. They claim that life is sacred and begins at conception. Groups opposed to abortion claim that allowing free access to pregnancy termination may encourage individuals to view it as a form of contraception. Also, it may result in selective abortion, meaning that parents can terminate pregnancies if scans indicate the fetus is the wrong gender or is disabled. Such unethical abuse can be prevented by restricting abortion or making it illegal. Hence, there two sides of abortion, meaning that legalizing can be considered as immoral, whereas on the other side it does not mean an increased number of abortions.

Advocacy groups, such as the Internation Campaign for Women Rights to Safe Abortion, argue that cultural and religious norms should not hinder or limit countries from implementing laws on safe pregnancy termination. They claim that enacting laws on safe abortion does not mean more women will be forced to terminate their pregnancies. The current stigmatization on abortion concerns has been increased by cultural and religious norms present in many countries. Advocacy groups support the implementation of abortion laws that demand the provision of quality and women-centred abortion care. The government should implement innovative strategies that reach underserved populations by the provision of support to women to equip them with the necessary resources to self-manage medical abortion. Governments should focus on improving access to and accessibility of medical and therapeutic abortion commodities.

In the United States, around 100 fetal heartbeat bills have been established in 25 states since 2011. Recent reports indicate that in 2019 approximately 16 states proposed prohibiting abortion at fetal heartbeat (Evans and Subasri 2). Currently, only three states across the country have successfully ratified such as proposed legislation including Arkansas, Lowa, and North Dakota. The bills enacted by these states were either passed by federal or state courts since the Supreme Court refused to hear them. Advocacy groups are using different argumentation and tactics to challenge the legal standards of early abortion ban legislation across the United States. Over the past decade, many legal and social movement tactics have been deployed in specific ways to challenge laws that ban abortion. The most active groups relate to reproductive health, deconstruct anti-abortion messaging, and rights and justice advocate groups. These groups use data or facts to apprise strategic tactics to promote sexual and reproductive health, rights, and fairness in the country as well as in other parts of the world.

The issue of abortion is still highly controversial following state legislation that restricts and regulate access to the procedure. Many of these state laws receive increased criticism and challenge from the federal courts with some being upheld, such as the rejection of state reserves for performing a pregnancy termination. For example, in 2018 Lowa adopted one of the United State’s most restrictive abortion laws following approval of a bill banning doctors from terminating a pregnancy if a fetus has a detectable heartbeat by Governor Kim Reynolds (“Abortion Topic Overview”). Other abortion laws have been enacted, such as those demanding spousal consent for terminating a pregnancy. Many groups continue to contribute or present their viewpoints regarding the ongoing debate, such as religious leaders, healthcare providers, politicians, and activities. Groups opposed to abortion often identify themselves as pro-life, whereas supporters of reproductive rights refer to themselves as pro-choice. Both groups of people have different opinions regarding abortion. Pro-life advocates may condone pregnancy termination in cases of rape or incest, whereas others take an uncompromising stance based on their beliefs that abortion is murder (“Abortion Topic Overview”). Some pro-choice activists contend that restrictions should be introduced on abortions. In contrast, others support laws that necessitate a waiting duration prior to performing an abortion procedure or legislations that demand minors to obtain permission or consent from their parents.

Many people who advocate or support abortions rights argue that limitations on abortions adversely impacts the poor, particularly those in less developed countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) approximations indicate that complications resulting due to unsafe pregnancy terminations cause deaths hundreds of thousands of womenfolk annually. WHO reports also indicate that the annual number of women who succumb due such problems has progressively lowered since the 1990s. Reports by Ipas, an international reproductive rights nonprofit organization attributes the decline to the enactment of abortion laws and increased access to safe pregnancy termination procedures and the use of effective contraception (“Abortion Topic Overview”). Nonetheless, the organization warns that the implementation of restrictive abortion policies in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-Central Asia continues to cause a high number of global deaths resulting from unsafe pregnancy termination. Activists of reproductive rights debate that banning abortion can make them cost-prohibitive for women who can only access limited resources. Most governments from across the globe control abortion procedures by implementing laws that define whether, when, wherefor, and how abortion should occur. Hence, they undertake active roles in regulating pregnancy terminations.

Overall, the legalization of abortion remains one of the most controversial topics globally. Many individuals, health care providers, politicians, and religious leaders offer their opinions regarding the moral value of abortion. The most influential historical event of pregnancy termination acts in the United States is the Supreme Court’s ruling of the Roe v. Wade case in 1973. The case triggers many developments, including the increased use of the utilization of the sonogram as well as the growing concerns about the link between fetal health and women’s occupational health. Currently, safe pregnancy termination is legal in many states, but some activist groups continue to oppose the legalization of abortion. Many people continue to call for legalization of abortion, whereas others continue to question its moral standing. In my opinion, abortion should be legalized for special cases, such as if the pregnancy was a result of rape as well as cases in which it threatens the life of the mother.

” Abortion Topic Overview”. Gale.Com , 2018.

Chavez, Nicole. “ The Rising Wave of Abortion Restrictions in America “. CNN , 2019. 

Evans, Dabney P., and Subasri Narasimhan. “A Narrative Analysis of Anti-Abortion Testimony and Legislative Debate Related to Georgia’s Fetal “Heartbeat” Abortion Ban.” Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, vol.28, no.1, 2020, pp. 1-18.

Kirkey, Sharon. “ As Abortion Debate Becomes Increasingly Polarized, Poll Shows the Views of Many Canadians are More Complicated “. National Post , 2020. 

Lipka, Michael, and John Gramlich. “ 5 Facts About the Abortion Debate in America “. Pew Research Center , 2019. 

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/heres-how-the-right-to-abortion-is-also-an-economic-issue

Here’s how the right to abortion is also an economic issue

This story was originally published by The 19th on May 4, 2022.

Correction: When this article was first published it mistakenly stated the incorrect author. The article has been updated to include the correct author. We regret the error.

In a leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued that pregnant people don’t actually need access to abortion to ensure economic mobility — they already have it.

According to the opinion, which was published by Politico Monday night , “unmarried pregnant women” — Alito does not include all pregnant people in his opinion — now have access to pregnancy discrimination protections, “guaranteed” medical leave “in many cases,” and medical costs that are “covered by insurance or government assistance.”

READ MORE: Black and Hispanic people have the most to lose if Roe is overturned

Those “modern developments” contradict the position held by many economists and abortion rights advocates for decades, Alito wrote. In his opinion — which Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed was a genuine draft, but said was not the official decision of the court — Alito concludes that it’s not up to the Supreme Court to assess “the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.”

But his argument doesn’t account for the significant limitations of the protections he lists and the persisting truth that the United States holds some of the worst records in the world in terms of pregnancy and birth-related workplace benefits, experts say. Some of the elements Alito describes in the opinion are still a work in progress. In other cases, they are leaving out some of the most vulnerable Americans.

The overarching argument Alito appears to be making is that the country has made strides since 1973, when Roe v. Wade went into effect, guaranteeing abortion rights up until fetal viability. Alito suggests that progress nullifies the connection between abortion access and economic justice. But experts on child care, paid leave and economics said his argument fails to capture how the protections codified into law in the past five decades are still not sufficient. The reasoning is also at odds with another stance held by some self-described anti-abortion feminists, who feel that access to abortion has stymied the development of robust policies to support pregnant people and families.

In terms of pregnancy discrimination, a bill with bipartisan support recently passed the U.S. House and is now being considered by the Senate to fortify workplace protections for pregnant people. But that bill was introduced precisely because significant loopholes still exist, even though Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978.

On what Alito characterizes as “guaranteed” family leave, the only workers who have anything close to guaranteed leave are the top 10 percent of earners in the country, 95 percent of whom have access to family leave that is unpaid, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only 36 percent of those highest earners also have paid family leave, and those numbers drop dramatically for the lowest paid workers, most of them women of color: 79 percent got unpaid family leave and only 5 percent had paid family leave in 2020.

Medical costs for birth are also still high, even with insurance coverage: about $4,300 on average for vaginal deliveries in 2015 and $5,200 for cesarean births, according to a wide-ranging study of more than 600,000 women in the United States between 2008 and 2015 who had health care insurance through their employer.

“The premise is false,” said Julie Kashen, a senior fellow and director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “Even if we had access to paid family leave and child care and insurance coverage for pregnancy and childbirth — even if we had all those things in place, which we do not, the need to have the right to abortion continues to exist.”

The United States ranks near the bottom of the list among advanced countries on how much it invests in child care, and it is one of only seven nations that has no national paid leave policy. Health care costs are so high in the United States, including for childbirth and pregnancy, that more than a third of American women reported skipping needed medical care, the highest rate among eleven high-income countries, according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation providing health care research on vulnerable communities. (The study did not look at trans or nonbinary people.)

Abortion access and economic security have long been proven to have deep connections. A landmark study that followed two groups of women over 10 years — one group that wanted an abortion and got one and one that wanted one but did not get the procedure — found that those who were denied an abortion by a clinic because they were too late in their pregnancies sank deeper into poverty as a result.

The study, which did not look at outcomes for trans or gender diverse people, pinpointed the lack of abortion access as the turning point in the women’s economic trajectories, in part because there was little policy support federally and in their workplaces to help them raise their children without facing financial hardship.

The past two pandemic years have crystallized how little support there is for pregnant people and parents — so little, in fact, that women left the labor force in unprecedented numbers at the start of the COVID-19 crisis because of lack of access to paid leave and child care. In the wake of that exodus, policies to pass federal paid leave and free pre-Kindergarten got as close to becoming a political reality as they ever have in this country.

And yet, they have not passed. 

Those who are most affected by the absence of those protections are the same group that will be affected by the lack of access to abortion: women and people of color.

“One of the things we have to remember is this narrative about abortion and who has access to abortion — we cannot forget that this is a race and class issue,” said Leng Leng Chancey, the executive director of 9to5, a national organization advocating for economic security for women of color.

WATCH: How Congress could wield its power to affect abortion law nationally

If Roe is ultimately overturned, as the draft opinion suggests it will be, the decision on how to restrict abortion will be left up to states . Most of the states that have already passed abortion restrictions are in the South and Midwest, the same places that have higher concentrations of low-wage workers . It is those workers, the majority of them women of color, who will face the most significant barriers to abortion, who may not be able to travel to other states to undergo the procedure and who may not even have the time off from work or financial wiggle room to consider that option.

Chancey said that when she was pregnant with her first child, she earned $7.25 an hour working at a university and was spending $150 a week on child care. They had a cesarean birth and were back at work less than 8 weeks after the surgery.

“I was afraid to lose my job — who can access [unpaid family leave]? Nobody that’s working a minimum wage job, because you have to put food on the table,” they said.

Low-income people of color often can’t afford to be out of work without pay for extended periods of time, but they are also more likely to be single parents and caregivers.

“We live in a nation that penalizes caregivers and caregiving responsibilities,” said Josephine Kalipeni, the executive director of Family Values @ Work, a national network of state and local coalitions working to pass workplace policies including paid family leave. When she had an abortion while in college, part of the decision was driven by the fact that she was the eldest of six children, expected to be a caregiver for her parents and while completing her education.

Kalipeni said she was working three jobs at the time, struggling to pay off her tuition at the end of each semester.

“I had to think and really weigh the cost knowing that my parents would not have an inheritance to pass down to me in the future, that my financial wellness was as connected to theirs as their own independent finances were, and now to think about disrupting my education, incurring the costs of having a child and having a child in the United States? There was absolutely no way I could financially or emotionally have a child,” Kalipeni said.

If Roe is overturned, groups like hers will only be emboldened to fight more for the policies Alito suggests are already in the books, she said.

“It ramps up our work in its definitive terms, but I also think it ramps up our responsibility to talk about reimagining a democracy and an economy that works for all of us,” she said. “It becomes a uniting moment.”

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What a Supreme Court ruling ending Roe v. Wade would mean for reproductive rights

Health May 03

Confusion over how pregnancy dates are measured is widespread – and makes for uninformed debate over abortion limits

Professor of Political Science, Hartwick College

Professor of political science, Augusta University

Professor of Political Science, North Carolina State University

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The funding for the survey discussed in this article was funded by the NC State School of Public and International Affairs.

Mary-Kate Lizotte and Steven Greene do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Most Americans don’t know two key facts about pregnancy, including how they are dated and how long a trimester is – and this could matter, as a growing number of states place restrictions on abortion.

Florida enacted a new law on May 1, 2024, that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with a few exceptions – including documented rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.

Florida joins the majority of Southern states that now have complete bans or highly restrictive abortion laws, enacted since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to get an abortion in June 2022. Many of the restrictive laws ban abortion after a set number of weeks.

Florida Republicans supporting the bill have labeled it a reasonable compromise between a full abortion ban and few abortion restrictions.

Some OB-GYNs have explained that many women do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks . Research shows that women on average find out they are pregnant at five and a half weeks. About 23% do not know until seven weeks of pregnancy or later.

So, do Americans, including those enacting six-week bans, actually understand how the timing or dating of pregnancy works?

We are scholars of political science , gender and public opinion and are writing a book about public opinion on abortion after the Supreme Court’s reversal of the federal right to get an abortion in June 2022.

How does pregnancy work?

To gain insights into this issue, we developed a few pregnancy questions and included them in a research survey in late September 2023. The survey had 1,356 respondents, who were broadly representative of the U.S. population. The respondents’ median age was 46. Approximately 49% of these people were men, while 70% were white and 29% were college graduates. Meanwhile, 43% of them were Democrats, and 38% were Republicans.

The first question asked respondents how pregnancies are dated. The correct answer is that pregnancies are dated using the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period, which is often two to three weeks before conception.

The second question asked about trimesters. Many Americans are familiar with the term trimester, and polling consistently shows that Americans find abortion most acceptable during the first trimester. We asked Americans if they knew approximately how many weeks a trimester was. The correct answer is 13.

Americans’ pregnancy knowledge

We found that only one-third of respondents knew how pregnancy is dated. A majority – approximately 60% – falsely thought that pregnancy is dated from conception or in the weeks since the woman last had sex. Less than one-fourth of the respondents answered both pregnancy knowledge questions correctly.

In our survey, we also asked respondents whether they support a six-week abortion ban. Similar to other national surveys , we find that most Americans oppose strict abortion restrictions – only 35% support six-week bans.

Importantly, we find that those who support six-week abortion bans are significantly less likely than others to correctly understand the timing of pregnancy. The statistically significant relationship between having low levels of pregnancy timing knowledge and support for a six-week abortion ban holds in analyses controlling for potentially confounding variables.

Some anti-abortion lawmakers have demonstrated their ignorance about pregnancy before.

There is, for example, a long history of some anti-abortion politicians saying, incorrectly, that it is extremely rare for a person who is raped to get pregnant. Our survey shows that a large swath of those opposing abortion lack knowledge about the basics of pregnancy.

A gender disparity

Perhaps not surprisingly, women in this survey knew more about pregnancy than men. The question about how pregnancies are dated, for example, was answered correctly by 43% of women compared with only 23% of men. As mentioned above, a majority of Americans incorrectly believe pregnancy is dated from conception, but significantly more men than women think this is true.

This finding is particularly important when considering the gender breakdown of the Florida state lawmakers who approved the six-week ban. Although we do not have data on the pregnancy knowledge of those legislators, we do know that those who voted for the ban were overwhelmingly men .

Florida’s six-week ban will make it much harder for anyone to get abortions there – and it will also affect people in neighboring states who want or need an abortion. In 2023, Florida was home to the closest abortion clinic for 6.4 million women living in the South. In 2023, around 7,700 women from other Southern states, where abortion is now largely banned , traveled to Florida to get abortions.

Overall, our findings raise serious questions about whether Americans without medical training – much like those in our state legislatures – have the necessary knowledge needed to regulate abortion access.

This story has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group’s position on an abortion ban after six weeks.

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Reproductive rights in America

6 key facts about abortion laws and the 2024 election.

Selena Simmons-Duffin

Elissa Nadworny

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion access has been in an almost constant state of flux.

State laws keep changing – with new bans taking effect in some places while new protections are enacted in others. And there have been a slew of lawsuits and ballot measures that may motivate voters come November.

Here are 6 facts about where things currently are with abortion and the election.

1. About half of states restrict abortion.

In 14 states, there are total bans on abortion, with very limited exceptions in cases such as rape or to save the life or health of the mother. A few more states – including Florida – have six-week bans, and often that's so early in a pregnancy most people don't yet know they're pregnant. Another half dozen states have restrictions that limit abortion after 12, 15, 18 or 22 weeks of pregnancy.

In the states that ban or severely restrict abortion access, the number of abortions has dropped drastically.

But legal challenges and ballot initiatives mean the map could keep shifting. So far, voters will be weighing in on the right to an abortion in four states: Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota. Six more states are in the process of getting it on the ballot, including Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Arizona, Arkansas and Montana.

2. Bans are affecting where doctors work.

Idaho illustrates how abortion bans can affect a state's broader health care system. Doctors are leaving the state, and three maternity wards have closed since the abortion ban took effect there.

"We lost 58 obstetricians either to moving out of state or retiring, and in that same time period, only two OB-GYNs moved into Idaho," says Dr. Sara Thomson, an OB-GYN in Boise. "That is not really a sustainable loss-to-gain ratio."

It's not just Idaho – a lot of hospital systems in states with abortion bans are having recruiting problems. The Association of American Medical Colleges earlier this month reported a decrease in medical students applying to residencies in states that limit abortion access. Essentially, these early career doctors are saying they don't want to practice medicine with the threat of fines, jail time, and the loss of their medical license.

3. Abortions are actually increasing nationally.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of abortions in the U.S. has continued to grow.

"We are seeing a slow and small, steady increase in the number of abortions per month and this was completely surprising to us," says Ushma Upadhyay, who co-leads the Society of Family Planning's WeCount project. According to their recent report, in 2023 there were, on average, 86,000 abortions per month compared to 2022, when there were about 82,000 abortions per month. "Not huge," says Upadhyay, "but we were expecting a decline."

A major factor in the uptick in abortions nationwide is the rise of telehealth, made possible in part by regulations first loosened during the coronavirus pandemic. Telehealth abortions now make up nearly 1 in 5 of all abortions in the U.S. Patients don't need to take off work and go to a clinic, they can connect with providers over text messages, phone calls or video, no matter where they live. Abortion medication is then mailed to them at home.

John Seago, president of Texas Right To Life, is concerned with the rise of abortions and increased access through telehealth.

"I'm afraid that we are going to wake up in 20 years and just kind of realize that we won in Dobbs , and then we've been losing ever since," Seago says. He told NPR his group is currently working on how to bring criminal and civil challenges to tamp down on the number of abortions.

4. Some states have moved to make abortion access easier.

Abortion was heavily regulated even while Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, and states like Michigan, Colorado, California, Minnesota and others have made moves to undo some of those regulations.

They are passing laws to get rid of waiting periods and gestational limits, and they are allowing more types of providers like nurse practitioners, for instance, to perform abortions. Some states have stockpiled mifepristone, one of the medicines that can be used for abortion, in case access is curtailed federally in the future.

New York City made an abortion hub as part of its health department, including a hotline and chat for people to find out where to get an abortion and how to get funding to cover the costs.

5. "Shield laws" create new access in untested legal terrain.

Another way some states have expanded abortion access is by passing "shield laws." These are laws that say doctors and nurses in states where abortion is legal can't be prosecuted by another state if they provide abortion across state lines. They apply if a woman travels to another state for an abortion or if the abortion provider mails pills to someone in a state with restrictions.

Lauren, who is 33 and lives in Utah, got a telehealth abortion from a provider in a state with shield laws. Lauren got pregnant on birth control and decided quickly that she couldn't afford another child. (NPR is not using her last name because she's worried about professional repercussions.)

Abortion is technically legal in Utah until 18 weeks, but access is severely restricted. It can only be performed in hospitals, for instance. So Lauren chose an online company called Aid Access, that provides telehealth abortion for people in all 50 states.

"In my situation, I felt more at ease than I would in a physician's office and more comfortable, to be honest," she explains. "Especially with a provider within the state of Utah – I feel like there's always a judgmental indication or undertone."

She filled out a form online with questions about how far along she was and her medical history, connected with a doctor via email and text messages, and received abortion medication in the mail. She had her abortion at home.

Some anti-abortion rights groups are hoping to test the legality of shield laws by bringing charges against a doctor, but that hasn't happened yet.

6. The Supreme Court could shake things up again.

There are two major decisions on abortion pending right now before the Supreme Court.

One is about the abortion pill mifepristone. The Court could restrict this drug for the whole country and totally change access to medication abortion through telemedicine. Court watchers think it won't go that way, but no one knows for sure.

The other case is about abortion in emergency situations and it centers on Idaho's medical exception. It's a fight over whether federal or state law should have priority. The oral arguments left legal analysts unsure about which way the Court was leaning.

Both of these decisions are expected in late June or early July, just a few months before the election. Regardless of what the justices decide, it's going to catapult abortion back into the headlines a few months before the election.

Ashley Brown, Diane Webber and Acacia Squires edited this story. Hilary Fung created the graphic.

• Blue States
• 2024 election
• Abortion rights
• Supreme Court

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Abortion statistics for England and Wales: 2022

Statistics and commentary on abortions carried out in 2022.

Applies to England and Wales

Abortion statistics, england and wales: 2022, guide to abortion statistics, england and wales: 2022, pre-release access lists: abortion statistics, england and wales, 2022, abortion statistics 2022: data tables.

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Abortion statistics 2022: additional tables

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This report sets out and comments on abortion statistics in England and Wales for 2022 and provides an update to the ad hoc publication Abortion statistics for England and Wales: January to June 2022 .

The statistics are obtained from the abortion notification forms returned to the chief medical officers of England and Wales.

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A Federal Judge Delivers Another Urgent, Scathing Warning About the Supreme Court

It takes a lot of courage for a lower court judge to criticize the Supreme Court, but Judge Carlton Reeves has long felt a responsibility to speak candidly to the public about threats to their civil rights. In an opinion on Monday, he calls for the abolition of qualified immunity—a noxious legal doctrine that insulates violent and corrupt government officials, especially law enforcement, from accountability. He embedded this call to action in a broader critique of the Supreme Court’s selective application of precedent—with a focus on the cavalier reversal of Roe v. Wade —as well as its pernicious distrust of democracy. Reeves’ opinion warns all who wish to listen that a broad array of our constitutional liberties are in serious and imminent jeopardy.

A Barack Obama appointee, Reeves sits on a U.S. District Court in Mississippi. His latest opinion was sparked by facts that he sees all too often and has written about before : the egregious violation of a criminal suspect’s constitutional rights as an innocent person wrongly charged with a crime. It began when detective Jacquelyn Thomas of Jackson, Mississippi, accused Desmond Green of murder. The detective’s only evidence was a statement made by Green’s acquaintance, Samuel Jennings—after Jennings was arrested for burglary and grand larceny, and while he was under the influence of meth. Thomas allegedly encouraged Jennings to select Green’s picture out of a photo lineup after he identified someone else as the killer. Allegedly, she also misled the grand jury to secure an indictment, concealing Jennings’ drug abuse as well as the many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his statement.

Jennings later recanted, admitting that, in his meth-addled state, he’d provided a bogus tip. A judge finally dismissed the charges. By that point, Green had spent 22 months in jail, serving pretrial detention. The facility was violent. The food was moldy. He slept on the floor. His cell was infested with snakes and vermin.

Green then sued Thomas, accusing her of malicious prosecution in violation of the Constitution . Thomas promptly asserted qualified immunity to defeat the lawsuit. This doctrine protects government officials from liability unless they run afoul of “clearly established” law. In other words, there must be an earlier case on the books with similar, “particularized” facts that explicitly bars the official’s actions. If there is no near-identical precedent that unambiguously prohibits those acts, qualified immunity kicks in, the lawsuit is tossed out, and the case never even reaches a jury.

This shield has allowed a repulsive amount of wrongdoing by police and prosecutors to go totally unpunished. Cops are permitted to brutally beat, murder , steal from , and conspire against innocent people because the rights they violate are, ostensibly, not “clearly established.” Courts regularly apply the doctrine when there is a tiny discrepancy between a previous case and the facts at hand as an excuse to let the officer off scot-free. And over the past few decades, SCOTUS itself has expanded qualified immunity to new extremes . The result, as Reeves wrote, is “a perpetuation of racial inequality”: Black Americans experience more violations of their civil rights than any other class, yet qualified immunity denies them a remedy in even the most appalling circumstances.

Here, though, Reeves refused to let the doctrine devour the Constitution. He concluded that there is sufficient on-point precedent to show that Thomas’ malicious prosecution, if proved, violated Green’s “clearly established” rights. So the case may go to trial. That, however, was not the end of his analysis—because, as he pointed out, the concept of qualified immunity is unlawful, unworkable, and indefensible.

The first problem is that judges made up the doctrine as a special favor to other employees of the government. Congress, as Reeves explained, gave individuals the power to sue state officials in federal court through the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, enacted after the Civil War so newly freed Black Americans could sue racist and abusive local police. Congress did not establish anything like “qualified immunity” in the statute. Rather, the Supreme Court invented the doctrine in 1967 , purporting to protect cops who commit illegal arrests in “good faith,” and imposed it unilaterally on the nation. It then crept, kudzu-like , into other areas of law.

“The People never enshrined qualified immunity in the Constitution,” Reeves wrote. “Our representatives in Congress never put it into the statute or voted for it. No President signed it into law. If anything, it represents a kind of ‘trickle-down’ democratic legitimacy.” In recent years, the Supreme Court has not bothered to account for qualified immunity’s origins, but rather maintains it on the basis of respect for precedent: It exists already, so it might as well keep existing.

And here is where Reeves goes for the jugular: The Supreme Court has tossed out far more defensible and entrenched precedent on the basis of far feebler excuses. How can it justify keeping qualified immunity around while recklessly destabilizing vast areas of settled law it doesn’t like?

SCOTUS has suggested that law enforcement officers have come to rely on qualified immunity, creating a “reliance interest” that counsels keeping the doctrine. But when the court overruled Roe in 2022’s Dobbs decision, Reeves wrote, the majority rejected that “kind of vague, ‘generalized assertion about the national psyche.’ ” Instead, Reeves wrote, the justices “thought voters should resolve reliance interests, not judges.” He then repurposed Dobbs ’ most notorious lines : “After all, just like women, law enforcement officers and their unions ‘are not without electoral or political power.’ ” Law enforcement officers, like women, can “affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” If courts can’t protect women’s bodily autonomy, he asked, why should they do the bidding of police unions?

Dobbs , Reeves went on, “also reflects the Supreme Court’s desire to remove itself from the center of a hot-button issue and return it to the electoral process.” Police reform, like abortion, is undoubtedly a “controversy on issues of life and death, where passions run high.” Yet even after Dobbs , SCOTUS “has not yet seen fit to return this contested issue to the democratic process,” Reeves opined. “It is not clear why.” After all, “the current court is certainly not shy about overturning precedent.” And the list of cases on the chopping block “seems to grow every year.” Teachers’ unions and racial minorities have watched the court gut precedent that shielded them for decades. Why should cops get favored treatment? Merely because of SCOTUS’ “policy-based choice” to “privilege government officials over all others.”

Reeves has a complex history with reproductive rights. He was the district court judge who struck down the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court later upheld in Dobbs when overruling Roe . His emphatic opinion famously accused the Mississippi Legislature of misogynistic “gaslighting,” analogizing the state’s defiance of Roe to its earlier defiance of Brown v. Board of Education . It’s evident that, to Reeves, the Supreme Court’s embrace of democracy in Dobbs rings hollow alongside its rejection of democracy in so many other areas, including the Second Amendment. (In a pointed footnote, he called out the court for treating the right to bear arms as a uniquely absolute, unlimited freedom —while greenlighting the erosion of other liberties that it values less.)

The judge folds together these rather scathing observations by reminding us that the Supreme Court’s creation and expansion of qualified immunity is, itself, a rejection of democracy. The Framers, after all, envisioned jury trials as a bulwark of democratic power, a check by “We the People” on government abuse. It was, Reeves wrote, designed to be exercised “one dispute at a time, day after day, rather than on fixed election days.” Unfortunately, an arrogant “judicial supremacy has too-often deprived the people of their proper role” in deciding whether public officials should be liable for their unconstitutional acts. Qualified immunity “reflects a deep distrust of ordinary people” in direct conflict with the Constitution. “In the same way we trust the collective judgment of voters in elections, we must trust the judgment of jurors in deciding cases,” Reeves wrote. They can resolve “tensions and contradictions case by case, as the evidence dictates.” All judges must do “is tell jurors the truth.”

Will the Supreme Court listen? The conservative justices seem disinclined to reevaluate their cynical, selective concerns about precedent and democracy. But with this opinion, Reeves has given the public yet another reason to question these justices’ increasingly dubious wisdom and integrity. Just as importantly, other judges may take note of Monday’s critique and follow Reeves’ suggestion of narrowing qualified immunity wherever possible. They might even join him in calling for its eradication, forcing SCOTUS to either stand by its handiwork or reevaluate it. The judge’s simple suggestion boils down to this: If we’re going to do democracy, let’s actually do democracy—not whatever partisan, half-baked substitute this Supreme Court is trying to pass off to the people.

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The first amendment, in the supreme court, unanimous decisions aren’t necessarily the “easy” cases.

May 21, 2024 | by Marcia Coyle

The late Justice Antonin Scalia once told this reporter: “There is no relationship between the difficulty of a case and its importance. It could be the most insignificant case, but it’s a bear figuring out the right answer."

But that assessment overlooks the countless hours of legal work put into briefs in each case by lawyers for both sides and lawyers representing “friends of the court,” as well as time spent by justices’ clerks preparing the cases and discussing them with their justices, and the justices’ own preparation for oral arguments and subsequent discussions in their private conference and then the writing and sharing of draft opinions.

Just how many unanimous decisions so far this term were actually “bears” to figure out? We aren’t likely to learn that answer for many years because of the confidentiality of the Justices’ deliberations and the lengthy holds they place on the public release of their private papers.

With so many potential blockbuster cases remaining to be decided– abortion, guns, Trump immunity, social media and more–the unanimous decisions may become just footnotes in final assessments of the October 2023 term. But here are three not so insignificant unanimous decisions worth more than a footnote.

Three Recent Unanimous Decisions

In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, Missouri , Jatonya Muldrow was a sergeant working on public corruption and human trafficking in the St. Louis Police department’s intelligence division for nine years. Muldrow learned she was being transferred out of the division by her supervisor in a department-wide email and was replaced by a male with whom her supervisor had previously worked.

Although her salary was unchanged, the transfer dramatically affected, for worse, her schedule, her supervisor, her duties, her work environment, and other job benefits and conditions. Muldrow sued the department claiming it had violated the nation’s major job discrimination law, Title VII.

As the case came to the Supreme Court, the issue was whether Muldrow, in making her Title VII discrimination claim, had to prove that the job transfer decision caused a “materially significant disadvantage.” That was the test imposed by a number of the lower courts.

The Supreme Court rejected that test. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, said: “Although an employee must show some harm from a forced transfer to prevail in a Title VII suit, she need not show that the injury satisfies a significance test. Title VII’s text nowhere establishes that high bar.”

To reach its decision, the court had to work through the city’s arguments about Title VII’s text, precedents and policy objections. The impact of the decision, Kagan added: “First, this decision changes the legal standard used in any circuit that has previously required ‘significant,’ ‘material,’ or ‘serious’ injury. It lowers the bar Title VII plaintiffs must meet. Second, because it does so, many cases will come out differently.”

But it wasn’t so simple for three justices who agreed with the case’s outcome but not its analysis. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito did not think the lower courts were imposing a high bar, just using terminology similar to Kagan’s “some harm.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said it was enough for Muldrow  to show that a change in the terms, compensation, conditions or privileges of her employment was because of sex. “The discrimination is harm,” he wrote.

Still, it was a unanimous decision even with the opinions of Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh.

In recent years, the Justices have had several cases in which they had to decide what type of workers were exempt from mandatory arbitration agreements with their employers. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. led the unanimous court in another of those cases– Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St .

Neal Bissonnette and Tyler Wojnarowski had a contract with the bakery company to distribute its baked goods in parts of Connecticut. When they sued the company for violating state and federal wage laws, the company moved to compel arbitration. The two men argued they were exempt from arbitration under Section 1 of the Federal Arbitration Act’s exception for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” The lower court ruled against the two men, saying that the §1 exemption was available only to workers in the transportation industry, but that the men were in the bakery industry.

The question for the Supreme Court was whether a transportation worker must work for a company in the transportation industry to be exempt under §1 of the FAA. “We conclude that there is no such requirement,” wrote Roberts.

Roberts, looking to past rulings, applied a canon of statutory interpretation known as ejusdem generis , which means that courts “interpret a ‘general or collective term’ at the end of a list of specific items in light of any ‘common attributes’ shared by the specific items.” Roberts explained that the general phrase “class of workers engaged in . . . commerce” is “controlled and defined by reference to” the specific categories “seamen” and “railroad employees” that precede it.” The court, he said, concluded in earlier cases that the “linkage” between “seamen” and “railroad employees” is that they are both transportation workers. In later cases, he added, the Court rejected the “industry-wide” approach sought by the baking company.

The key in these cases, explained the Chief Justice, is what the workers do, not for whom they do it. The court’s decision could have a real world impact on drivers in a variety of industries, making it easier for them to qualify for the exemption from mandatory arbitration.

And finally, the justices were asked in Department of Agriculture v. Kirtz   whether the federal government was a lender who could be sued under the Fair Credit Reporting Act for reporting false information to agencies that generate credit reports or was it shielded from such lawsuits by sovereign immunity.

In what Justice Kagan called “Statutory Interpretation 101” during arguments in November, a unanimous court, led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, ruled the government could be sued for damages when Reginald Kirtz claimed the USDA falsely told TransUnion—a credit reporting agency—that his account was past due, thus damaging his credit score and his ability to secure loans at affordable rates.

The federal government is generally immune from suits for money damages unless Congress has waived its sovereign immunity. Gorsuch wrote that the Court determines a waiver of immunity by applying a “clear statement” rule– the language of a statute must be unmistakably clear that Congress has waived immunity. The court previously had found such a waiver only in two situations.

The government raised “many and resourceful arguments,” Gorsuch wrote. But in 20 pages, he carefully found that none of those arguments overcame the language of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The act requires “person[s]” who furnish information to consumer reporting agencies to investigate consumer complaints and make any necessary corrections. The act authorizes consumer suits for money damages against “[a]ny person” who willfully or negligently fails to comply with this directive. And another section of the act defines the term “‘person’” to include “any . . . governmental . . . agency.” 

Significant? In his opinion, Gorsuch noted: A 2021 study cited by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found “that over 34% of consumers surveyed were able to identify at least one error in their credit reports.” Mistakes like these, he wrote, can lead lenders to insist on higher interest rates or other terms that make it “difficult or impossible” for consumers “to obtain a mortgage, auto loan, student loan, or other credit.” These days, too, he added, federal agencies are among “‘the largest furnishers of credit information’” to consumer reporting agencies. 

All three cases involved interpreting statutes, which is the meat-and-potatoes work of the Supreme Court. The constitutional challenges are really a small part of what the court does each term but attract a disproportionate amount of attention.

In all three cases, there were numerous briefs and arguments on each side that required the justices to address in some way as they reached and supported their decisions. Was any one of the three a “bear” to figure out? Maybe. But you could add to Justice Scalia’s insight with some confidence that there really are no easy cases in the Supreme Court.

Marcia Coyle is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily and PBS NewsHour . She was the Chief Washington Correspondent for The National Law Journal, covering the Supreme Court for more than 30 years.

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Embrace the economic benefits of immigration.

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

Immigration has become such a divisive issue that many Minnesotans feel they are being pushed into one of two camps. They are either soft-hearts who empathize with downtrodden people seeking a better life in America or hard-heads who want to defend the nation's economy and laws.

But this is a false dichotomy. "We don't have to choose between what's good for the economy and being humanitarian," says Jane Graupman, executive director of the International Institute of Minnesota, an important player in refugee resettlement. "They help each other." Minnesota — and the nation — needs leaders who can recognize that, cut through the ugliness and help us find common ground.

The humanitarian case for helping more refugees and immigrants is clear. The number of displaced people in the world has soared in recent years, from fewer than 50 million in 2012 to more than 100 million in 2022, as more countries sank into civil war, drought, corruption and violent crime. One could argue that citizens of countries such as Syria and Venezuela should fix their own problems first. But considering that most are poverty-stricken or displaced villagers facing brutal, armed autocrats, that is neither likely nor compassionate.

The economic argument is equally clear — that is, if anyone pays attention to facts anymore. The financier and former "auto czar" Steven Rattner says that to simply maintain our economic and population growth of the past two decades, the United States would have to accept some 4 million legal immigrants a year, up from roughly 1 million in recent years.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that immigration will add $7 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next decade and $1 trillion to federal revenues. Why? Foreign-born Americans are more likely to hold jobs and more likely to start new businesses than native-born residents.

If you don't find statistics persuasive, listen to two prominent Republican governors, Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Spencer Cox of Utah, who have become leading advocates for more immigration. "Rapidly declining birthrates and accelerating retirements across the United States mean that our states' already-wide job gaps will grow to crisis proportions without more [immigrant] families — causing our growth engines to sputter," they wrote recently in the Washington Post.

But doesn't immigration depress wages? Common sense says yes, but hard research says otherwise. A series of remarkable studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that immigration actually has a mild positive effect on overall wages. That's because, on the whole, immigrants mostly don't compete directly with native-born workers. Immigrants and refugees, on average, tend to be very high-skilled (think physicians and programmers) or very low-skilled (think landscapers and construction laborers), which means they "complement" the mid-skilled native-born workforce more than they compete with it.

By filling what otherwise would be gaps in the workforce, immigrants allow companies to grow, raise productivity and stimulate economic growth. And don't forget that immigrants and refugees start small businesses at extremely high rates, creating jobs for landlords, vendors and other local businesses.

None of this will persuade folks who are fundamentally offended by the idea that people are breaking the law and we can't police our own borders. Fair enough — the current immigration system is full of flaws.

So here's an idea. Remember Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who sent planeloads of immigrants to liberal northern cities such as Chicago and New York? That was a mean-spirited and counterproductive strategy. But what if the federal government stepped in to make it compassionate and productive? Query the governors and mayors with severe labor shortages — there are plenty — and then help them integrate immigrants and refugees while making it easier to obtain work permits and other legal documents.

Immigration policy has bedeviled the United States almost since its founding, as the great historian John Higham noted in his book, "Strangers in the Land." But over the decades, Congress has repeatedly found solutions to these problems as they cropped up — generally productive solutions — and there is no reason why it can't now.

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