10 Facts About the Experiences of Women Who Choose to Have Abortions
One more time, for the people in the back. Listen to women.
This is an issue that, for reasons that we’ll explain in the article, is incredibly important to me and Julia. As such, we want to make this and Thursday’s article free to everyone. Please share with others.
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I hope that when our hypothetical children enter high school history in 15-20 years, their teachers will talk to them about significant days and events that all of us have recently lived through that shaped American history, particularly noting the ways that authoritarians have attempted to wrest the values of democracy.
January 6, 2021 is an obvious candidate.
May 25, 2020, the night that George Floyd was murdered and White progressive Americans got out of our own ways (at least for a summer) and advocated for the safety of Black lives in ways that many in our generation have not previously seen.
And I would highly vote for June 24, 2022, the day that the Supreme Court passed the ruling for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the highly compromised conservative majority voted to turn abortion privileges and regulations over to the states. The usual suspects responded as often happens around states rights issues, in which minority rule designs legislation that criminalizes the wants and needs of the majority—in this case, the pursuit and supply of abortion services.
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I’ll make a quick note here that Planned Parenthood, the country’s premier organization that provides accessible women’s health services, served a shade over 2 million people, with 9.13 million service items, according to their 2022 annual report. 392,715 of those items were specifically related to abortion.
4.63 million service items pertained to STI testing.
2.25 million pertained to contraceptive services, including the delivery of over 550,000 contraception kits. (And over 4,000 vasectomies. Men seek Planned Parenthood services as well.)
925,000 pregnancy tests. While pregnancy tests themselves are easy to access, many choose Planned Parenthood as spaces to undergo pregnancy tests because of the confidential spaces and process that PP provides.
464,000 cancer screenings and prevention services. This includes breast cancer care, cervix care (the line item in the report is “colposcopy procedures), and Pap tests.
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Dobbs, they not only allowed states to establish draconian policies for abortion, but they also cut off other important women’s healthcare services that are necessary for safety, disease prevention, and thriving, especially for women who are poor and may lack insurance and/or affordable healthcare (because having insurance does not equal affordable healthcare) and women who exist in sexually oppressive families/communities and rely on the anonymity of Planned Parenthood (or their smaller, more local women’s care provider) to receive their healthcare services.
snuffed out the rat in this morning’s Letters from an American:“The promise to return decision making to the states has always been an attempt to enable a minority to impose its will on the majority, but the Dobbs decision revealed that minority to be so extremist it appears to have engaged, and enraged, people who before it were not paying much attention to politics.”
Given the role that abortion has in the propaganda spouted by the 21st century Republican Party, it can be extremely difficult to have effective conversations about abortion.
For starters, the pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy is far more nuanced than described by the current political discourse. On Thursday, we’ll describe a research study that assessed for the public’s beliefs about abortion, and for most folks, the answer is “It’s complicated.” The pro-choice/pro-life conversation is more accurately a continuum than a binary.
For instance, I am an adopted person who is actively seeking adoption as a way to grow my family, who also heavily advocates for the rights and capacities for women to make their choices for their own bodies. My fear is that we will benefit from the draconian anti-abortion measures imposed by right-wing congressional units, and that we will fly to some random place like Boise Idaho, where a woman delivers a child because she didn’t have the choice thanks to the efforts of the “pro-life” contingent. While politics around abortion were a bit different in 1984, I’m also the product of someone who chose, for reasons unknown to me, to deliver me, safe-baby haven-style in a West Texas hospital when she just as easily could have had an abortion.
Here’s a really dark thought. I don’t know my birthmother’s situation, but I may have made a different decision about what to do with the pregnancy than she did.
Again, super complicated.
If Julia were writing this Substack, I presume she would talk about the experience of miscarriage, which is medically defined as a “spontaneous abortion”, and the physiological and psychological risks that women who are at higher risk for miscarriage face as a result of the overturning of Roe v Wade. Needless to say, there’s a reason that we will not be living in Dallas, Nashville, or Raleigh-Durham, or Atlanta anytime soon.
More importantly, conversations about abortion are driven by public perception, as opposed to the actual experiences of women who have unintended pregnancies, which leads us to today’s Substack.
In 2020, Diana Greene Foster released the book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having, or Being Denied, an Abortion. The Turnaway Study, conducted by the University of California-San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, reflects upon almost 8,000 interviews with 1,000 women who sought abortions between 2008 and 2010, back when Roe v. Wade was still a thing.
These women tended to fall into three categories:
Women who sought an abortion up to three weeks past the gestational limits and were turned away without receiving an abortion. (Turnaways.)
Women who sought an abortion up to two weeks prior to the gestational limit established by the state.
Women who sought and received an abortion in their first trimester of pregnancy.
It should be noted, by the way, that women who pursue second-trimester pregnancies had additional issues, most notably:
Raising other children alone.
Depression and/or PTSD, and coinciding substance use issues.
High volumes of conflict with a male partner, including, but not limited to domestic violence.
Trouble deciding, often due to moral incongruence, and then had challenges accessing care.
Were between the ages of 20-24.
Back to the Turnaway Study. The participants of this study were interviewed every six months for over five years about the effect of their unintended pregnancy and the decision that they made to have an abortion. In their fact sheet, they summarize:
“The Turnaway Study is an effort to capture women’s stories, understand the role of abortion and childbearing in their lives, and contribute scientific data to the ongoing public policy debate on the mental health and life-course consequences of abortion and unwanted childbearing for women and families.”
The Turnaway Study found the following ten themes in their interviews with women.
The three most common reasons that women choose to have abortions are not having the financial resources to have and raise a child, the pregnancy coming at a time that interferes with other goals of the woman, and being in a conflictual partnership with the potential co-parent.
95% of women, when asked about their decision five years post-receiving an abortion (or being turned away), feel positive about their decision to pursue an abortion. The intensity of the emotions tend to diminish after the first year.
Being denied an abortion is linked to increased levels of anxiety and stress, and significantly reduced self-esteem for the first year of their life.
Being denied an abortion is connected to a higher likelihood of physical, life-threatening conditions, such as preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage. Turnaways also report higher levels of chronic pain and lower levels of overall physical health five years after the attempted abortion. Two turnaways in their study died due to pregnancy-related causes after giving birth after being denied an abortion.
Being denied an abortion creates economic insecurity for the life of the child and family that Republicans are allegedly pro. Women who were denied abortions were almost four times as likely to live under the poverty line than women who received abortions, experiencing more debt and lower credit scores despite having similar financial statuses to women who received abortions three years prior to the unwanted pregnancy.
Women who receive abortions are six times likelier to have positive plans for their future one year post-abortion than women who are denied abortions. Women who are denied abortions are less likely to pursue graduate or post-graduate education.
As stated earlier, fundraising is a common issue for delaying abortions into second trimester. Because many women during this time either didn’t have health insurance, or had insurance policies that didn’t cover abortion, they struggled to come up with the money to pay for the abortion, suggesting that abortion creates more stress for poorer and lower-class women than for middle-class women.
Women who receive an abortion are more likely to pursue pregnancy within the next five years than women who are denied abortions. Similarly, children who are born to women who get pregnant following an abortion are more likely to have more financial and social resources than children who were born to women who were denied an abortion.
Many women choose to see their ultrasounds, and have a variety of emotional experiences, including positive ones.
Protestors don’t change how women feel about their abortions. With that said, about half of the participants saw protestors at the women’s health clinic, and some mentioned feeling troubled at the time by protestors, especially if they engaged or had contact with protestors.
As we’ll discuss Thursday, qualitative and quantitative research doesn’t always align with public opinion. Which makes sharing this information all the more important.
If the pro-choice/pro-life conversation is important to you, or someone that you know, it’s important that we have the facts correct about the women who are navigating whether or not to have an abortion, despite what we perceive is moral or not. Please share this article, and the work of the Turnaway Project, with friends and family.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia