USA – Abortion Bans May Be Making Second-Trimester Abortions More Likely

Jun 26, 2025
by Chantelle Lee

The fraction of people who got an abortion in their second trimester more than doubled in states that enforced near-total abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, new research has found.

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health on Thursday, found that the proportion of abortions that took place at or after 13 weeks of pregnancy jumped from 8% before a ban was enforced to 17% afterward. The average point in pregnancy when the people who participated in the study were able to obtain an abortion also rose, from 7.7 weeks gestation pre-ban to 8.8 weeks gestation post-ban.

Continued: https://time.com/7297838/abortion-bans-second-trimester-travel-burden/

26.06.2025

News

Research

Diana Greene Foster

negative effects of abortion bans

United States

Health

Human Rights

USA – The future of federal abortion data collection is unclear

Federal data collection on abortion is indefinitely on pause, making it difficult to determine how the reversal of Roe v. Wade has reshaped Americans' lives.

Chabeli Carrazana
June 23, 2025

A government watchdog says it’s unclear when — or even whether — we’ll know going forward how the end of national abortion protections impact Americans’ health outcomes, livelihoods and financial futures as the federal government turns away from abortion data collection indefinitely.

A report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office and first shared exclusively with The 19th analyzed the existing data on the economic impact of abortion bans and found that government tracking has been very limited — and could become more so due to changes made by the Trump administration.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/06/federal-data-abortion-unclear-gao-report/

23.06.2025

Commentary

data collection on abortion

Diana Greene Foster

Government Accountability Office

National Institutes of Health

Australia – How abortion is weaponised in family court

A recent change to the Family Law Act may still fall short of protecting women from being cross-examined about their sexual health history.

By Madison Griffiths
June 14 – 20, 2025

In the mid 1990s, Louisa* – barely an adult – made two decisions to spare herself a lifetime of pain. On two separate occasions, she slipped quietly through the gates of a concealed clinic, careful to avoid the protesters gathered out the front. Louisa had weighed up her options and knew that acquiring abortion care was her best bet. She wasn’t yet financially or emotionally fit to become a mother. Nor could she bear to be tethered to the man who had got her pregnant.

Almost two decades later, in 2021, Louisa arrived at the Family Law Court in Brisbane’s central business district. She was ready, she thought, to fight for the custody of her then seven-year-old daughter. The last thing she expected was for those choices in her early 20s to be raised in the hearings. On the sixth day, the independent children’s lawyer asked Louisa’s ex-husband if he was aware that, in a previous relationship, she had terminated two pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/health/2025/06/14/how-abortion-weaponised-family-court

She was tracking post-Roe abortions. The government just pulled her funding.

Diana Greene Foster, who was behind the landmark Turnaway Study, wanted to study the health and economic impacts of the loss of abortion access.

Shefali Luthra, The 19^th
April 9, 2025

Diana Greene Foster is responsible for landmark research on the effects of abortion access — a massive 10-year study that tracked thousands of people who had an abortion or were denied one. But funding for a follow-up to her seminal Turnaway Study has just been cut as part of a wave of canceled health policy research.

Foster received a MacArthur “genius grant” for the Turnaway Study. That piece of research, which examined the impact of restrictions even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, helped shape public understanding of how abortion access can affect people’s health and economic well-being by finding that people who were denied abortions were more likely to experience years of poverty compared to those who could terminate their unplanned pregnancies.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/04/abortion-government-funding-diana-greene-foster/

09.04.2025

Commentary

Research

ational Institutes of Health

Diana Greene Foster

funding cuts for abortion research

USA -Why abortions rose after Roe was overturned

Contrary to many predictions, abortions did not decline nationally after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Here's what's behind the trend.

Nov. 26, 2024
By Aria Bendix

It seemed only logical after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that abortion rates would go down and births would go up. Instead, the opposite happened: Abortions went up last year and the country’s fertility rate hit a historic low.

More than 1 million abortions were recorded in the United States in 2023 — the highest in a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion access. So far this year, abortion rates have remained about the same as in the last six months of 2023, preliminary data show.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/abortions-rose-roe-overturned-why-rcna181094

26.11.2024

Commentary

abortion by mail

Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access

abortion pills

Aid Access

Alliance Defending Freedom

American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs

Center for Reproductive Rights

Comstock Act

Diana Greene Foster

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Dr. Amy Whitaker

Dr. Christina Francis

Dr. Remy Coeytaux

Erik Baptist

Florida Access Network

Food and Drug Administration

Guttmacher Institute

Julie Kay

Karoline Leavitt

Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project

Matthew Kacsmaryk

medication abortion

mifepristone

National Right to Life

Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro

telemedicine abortion

The Brigid Alliance

traveling for abortion

U.S. States with strictest abortion laws offer the least support for women and families

Researchers evaluated states on access to maternal and family social services, childcare assistance and supplemental nutritional programs for families with children.

Sept. 4, 2024
By Kaitlin Sullivan

States with abortion bans are falling short in helping low-income families, experts say. New research from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago compared state abortion laws to public programs meant to help families, such as paid parental leave and state-funded nutrition programs for families with children.

“States with the most severe abortion restrictions have the least public infrastructure to support families,” said Dr. Nigel Madden, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who led the study published Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/states-strictest-abortion-laws-offer-least-support-women-families-rcna169578

04.09.2024

Commentary

Research

anti-choice contempt for women

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice misogyny

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Caitlin Myers

Diana Greene Foster

Dr. Nigel Madden

Family and Medical Leave Act

USA – Researchers call for more abortion studies to be retracted

The criticism of four older studies alleging abortion causes mental illness follows high-profile retractions of studies claiming the abortion pill is dangerous.

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Health and science experts published a commentary in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday calling for the retraction of four older abortion-related studies that, despite documented flaws, have influenced major anti-abortion decisions over the past 20 years, including the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned federal abortion rights.

The commentary comes the same month academic publisher Sage Journals retracted studies calling into question the long-established safety record of the abortion drug mifepristone, which were produced by anti-abortion activists shortly before they sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the same drug.

Continued: https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/27/researchers-call-for-more-abortion-studies-to-be-retracted/

USA – Measuring the long-term cost of restricting abortion access

By Annalisa Merelli
Oct. 17, 2023

When Diana Greene Foster and her team at the University of California, San Francisco, started their study on the lives of women who were denied abortions in 2008, they sought to investigate a rather commonly held view: That having an abortion hurt women’s mental and physical health, including by leading to PTSD and drug and alcohol use disorder.

A series of laws had been passed based on this belief, introducing compulsory counseling and waiting periods for people seeking abortions, thereby adding barriers to accessing the procedure, especially for patients with lower incomes who couldn’t afford repeated time off work, travel, and associated costs such as child care.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/17/harms-from-restricting-abortion-access-research/

17.10.2023

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Abortion access could continue to change in year 2 after the overturn of Roe v. Wade

July 3, 2023
Selena Simmons-Duffin

From the moment the Supreme Court decision overturning the right to an abortion was leaked last spring, researchers and pundits began to predict the consequences.

A year later, data is beginning to bring the real-life effects into focus. Over a dozen states have near total abortion bans, with several more state bans in the works. At least 26 clinics have closed. In Texas, nearly 10,000 more babies were born in the state since its 2021 "heartbeat bill" took effect.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/03/1185849391/abortion-access-could-continue-to-change-in-year-2-after-the-overturn-of-roe-v-w

USA – Setting the Record Straight on Abortion and Maternal Health

The Turnaway Study’ was published in 2020 to much acclaim. Now the integrity of a paper criticizing it is being investigated.

Colleen Flaherty
November 14, 2022

Frontiers in Psychology, a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by Frontiers Media, is investigating a recent paper criticizing a landmark study on abortion and maternal well-being.

Frontiers published an expression of concern—separate from the review article itself—last month, after readers pointed out that the article had been edited and peer reviewed only by scientists with antiabortion views. The editor and three out of four reviewers are affiliated with one antiabortion group in particular.

Continued: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/14/journal-investigating-antiabortion-paper

14.11.2022