USA – How abortion bans will strain an already failing foster system

Poor families are more likely to be separated by the government. The Dobbs decision will make it worse.

By Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
Jul 9, 2023

When Michael’s mother called Maine’s primary welfare assistance hotline asking for help, she was a depressed and homeless 18-year-old single mother of three. It was the winter of 1996, and her boyfriend — her last source of additional support — had left her.

A social worker with Maine’s Child Protective Services offered assistance with finding an apartment, but there was a catch — Michael’s mother had to agree that her young children would be taken into foster care. In the state’s eyes, her poverty meant she didn’t have the resources to take care of her kids. But perhaps they could be reunited once she became more stable. This never happened.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/7/9/23786276/foster-care-adoption-system-poverty-neglect-dobbs-abortion

Low-wage workers bear financial burden of denied abortions

By Anne D'Innocenzio, Alexandra Olson, Associated Press
Oct 26, 2022

A Texas mother of a toddler, scraping by on her husband’s income, was desperate to return to work but struggling to afford child care. A young Florida warehouse worker had barely left behind a turbulent past of homelessness and abuse only to be mired in debt.

When both women learned they were pregnant, they came to the agonizing conclusion they couldn’t go through with it.

Continued: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/low-wage-workers-bear-financial-burden-of-denied-abortions

26.10.2022

Commentary

Featured

barriers for low-income women

Caitlin Myers

Erika Bachiochi

National Bureau of Economic Research

Forced Parenthood and Failing Safety Nets: This Is Life in Post-Roe America

The states with the strictest abortion laws are doing the least to help poor families. What could possibly go wrong?
Abby Vesoulis
August 29, 2022

Melissa Kearse, a 38-year-old single mother of five, has never had an abortion. She never wanted one. “I come from a very religious background,” she explains, “where my-body-my-choice is not necessarily my body and my choice.”

But in her home state of Georgia, any choice she did have was stripped away by the state’s conservative legislature, which in 2019 passed a trigger ban on abortion after six weeks gestation that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this past June. Though Kearse is personally opposed to having an abortion, she is exasperated by Georgia’s call to meddle in this decision, particularly as someone who has struggled to provide for her family and been repeatedly let down by the state’s social welfare programs. “I don’t feel comfortable with somebody telling me what I can and cannot do if you’re not helping me provide,” she says. “If I got pregnant again, I would drown.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/abortion-bans-states-social-safety-net-dobbs/

Six Predictions About the End of Roe, Based on Research

I’ve studied what happens to people who are denied an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy. Here’s what I learned.

By DIANA GREENE FOSTER
06/08/2022

When I was in high school, I learned a secret my grandmother had kept for decades: She’d had an abortion. The story came out after she passed away and my grandfather announced that, at her request, in lieu of flowers donations should be made to Planned Parenthood. For me, as a naïve teenager, it was a surprise that someone so maternal and loving would have had an abortion. I had been taught – through TV shows, movies and books – that abortion was something that irresponsible people do to avoid childbearing. I am sure this is how many people still see abortion.

The story my grandfather told was that my grandmother became pregnant early in their marriage, during the Great Depression when she and my grandfather didn’t have the jobs, money and security to provide for a child. So she traveled from New York to Puerto Rico to get an illegal abortion. Later she went on to have three children: my dad, my aunt and my uncle.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/08/the-end-of-roe-wont-cause-birth-rates-or-adoptions-to-spike-00037864

08.06.2022

Featured

Opinion

Diana Greene Foster

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

economics and abortion

USA – Abortion Doesn’t Fuck Up Our Mental Health. Losing the Right to It Will.

"Forced parenthood only leads to continued cycles of trauma, as well as intergenerational trauma."

BY ROSEMARY DONAHUE
May 31, 2022

On Monday, May 2, a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion vote written by Justice Samuel Alito to strike down Roe v. Wade was leaked. It hit the internet like a lightning bolt; though the law that preserves federal legal abortion hasn't officially been overturned yet, many have spent the last three weeks poring over the document's language, and its potential implications have brought the nation to yet another emotional boiling point.

In the draft, which aims to kick the issue of abortion back down to the state level, Alito writes, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences." But what, exactly, are these supposed consequences, and who has been suffering them? Anti-choice supporters often point to the supposed emotional harm caused by abortion, citing regret, depression, or even suicide as possible outcomes in its aftermath. While it's true abortion can be both an emotional topic and decision, this short-sighted argument isn't a valid cause to remove the choice from those who seek out this life-saving care.

Continued: https://www.allure.com/story/abortion-suicide-mental-health-link

Women who are denied abortions risk falling deeper into poverty. So do their kids

May 26, 2022
Jennifer Ludden

Like most women seeking an abortion, Brittany Mostiller already had children when she unexpectedly got pregnant again. "I had two young daughters both under the age of 5, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my sister," she says. She'd also just been laid off from her overnight job as a greeter for Greyhound buses. Her unemployment benefits were less than her wages there, and nearly all of them went toward rent and utilities. "I'm not even sure I had a cellphone at that time," she says. "If I did, it was certainly on and off," to save money.

Continued:https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1100587366/banning-abortion-roe-economic-consequences

USA – When a Right Becomes a Privilege

The main difference between the women who will make it to an abortion provider in a post-Roe world and those who won’t? Money.

By Melissa Jeltsen, The Atlantic
May 15, 2022

When New York legalized abortion in 1970—three years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade—a shrewd entrepreneur named Martin Mitchell saw an opportunity. The 31-year-old Detroit-area man chartered a tiny private plane and began advertising frequent flights from Michigan, where elective abortion was illegal, to Niagara Falls, New York, where it was not. For $400, a woman got transportation, an abortion by a licensed doctor at a clinic near the airport, and lunch, before being flown home the same day.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/roe-v-wade-abortion-access-poor-women/629858/

USA – A landmark study tracks the lasting effect of having an abortion — or being denied one

May 15, 2022
Megan Burbank, Emily Kwong – NPR

Though it's impossible to know exactly what will happen to abortion access if Roe v. Wade is overturned, demographer Diana Greene Foster does know what happens when someone is denied an abortion. She documented it in her groundbreaking yearslong research project, The Turnaway Study and her findings provide insight into the ways getting an abortion – or being denied one – affects a person's mental health and economic wellbeing.

For over 10 years, Dr. Foster and her team of researchers tracked the experiences of women who'd received abortions or who had been denied them because of clinic policies on gestational age limits.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/15/1098347992/a-landmark-study-tracks-the-lasting-effect-of-having-an-abortion-or-being-denied

15.05.2022

The end of Roe will mean more children living in poverty

How “pro-life” states are failing new parents and babies.

By Dylan Scott
May 12, 2022

Almost half the United States is ready to outlaw abortion, if given a green light by the Supreme Court, something it’s expected to do in the next few months. But many of those states are not willing to give new babies and their families the educational, medical, or financial support they need to lead a healthy life. That could leave tens of thousands of future children unnecessarily disadvantaged and living in poverty.

The precise effect on new births from the 22 states set to enact broad abortion bans if Roe v. Wade is overturned is impossible to predict. But public health experts like Diana Greene Foster — the lead researcher on the Turnaway Study, an enormous survey project that tracked the long-term effects of receiving or being denied an abortion — expect a meaningful increase in the number of women with an unwanted pregnancy who nevertheless give birth. Middlebury College economics professor Caitlin Knowles Myers anticipates as many as 75,000 people who want an abortion but can’t get one will end up giving birth in the first year after Roe is overturned.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23057032/supreme-court-abortion-rights-roe-v-wade-state-aid

Lizelle Herrera’s case highlights the misunderstood realities of abortion access, criminalization, and advocacy in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley

Cross-movement collaboration at the intersections of criminal and reproductive justice helped local organizers mobilize quickly

by Tina Vásquez
April 21st, 2022

On April 8, a small news outlet covering Texas’ Rio Grande Valley published a story that sent shockwaves through the reproductive justice movement. A woman named Lizelle Herrera was arrested April 7 by the Starr County Sheriff’s Office and charged with murder for allegedly having a self-induced abortion, which is when a person chooses to perform their own abortion outside of a medical setting. According to her indictment, Herrera “intentionally and knowingly” caused “the death of an individual.” She was held at the Starr County Jail, and her bond was set at $500,000.

In the days since Herrera’s story was made public, there has been a great deal of reporting about whether her criminalization was simply “a hasty error” by a district attorney or a case that should be treated as “a warning” that “foreshadows [a] post-Roe future.” But for reproductive justice advocates in Texas who are forced to navigate some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, Herrera’s case isn’t merely a sign of what’s to come; it’s a reality that low-income women of color overwhelmingly shoulder. It’s also the inevitable result of complicated, convoluted anti-abortion laws.

Continued: https://prismreports.org/2022/04/21/realities-navigating-texas-anti-abortion-laws/