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

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Carol Hogue

Charlotte Lozier Institute

Committee on Publication Ethics

Frontiers in Psychology

Jamie Barclay

Priscilla K. Coleman

Turnaway study

Latinas are the targets of abortion misinformation. Providers and advocates are pushing back

Most of the abortion misinformation comes from online platforms, anti-abortion protests outside clinics and crisis pregnancy centers run by anti-abortion rights activists.

Aug. 5, 2022
By Nicole Acevedo

Latinas who work in clinics and with organizations that are making abortions accessible after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade say they're increasingly having to counter abortion-related misinformation that can harm women and the larger communities the groups serve.

Misinformation spreaders have found ways to latch on to the national abortion conversation in English and in Spanish “to continue disseminating this misinformation at a more rapid pace,” said Susy Chávez of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinas-abortion-misinformation-online-spanish-hispanic-rcna40590

USA – 39 Celebrities Who Have Had Abortions—And Spoken Out About Them

They're among the one in four women who will get abortions in their lifetimes.

By Jenny Singer
June 13, 2022

Abortion is a human right. Abortion is basic health care. Celebrities who have had abortions and spoken out about them are in good company among the one in four women who will get abortions in their lifetime.

Abortion should be no more stigmatized than any other medical decision. But as the Supreme Court looks poised to roll back Roe v. Wade after 50 years of legal abortions, the ongoing crisis of abortion access is becoming even more of an emergency. “Celebrities today regularly reveal the details of their drug addictions, sexual obsessions, marital infidelities—but no celebrity in recent memory has admitted to ending a pregnancy,” Susan Dominus wrote in Glamour in 2005.

https://www.glamour.com/gallery/celebrities-who-have-had-abortions-and-spoken-out-about-them

USA – The Most Important Study in the Abortion Debate

Researchers rigorously tested the persistent notion that abortion wounds the women who seek it.

By Annie Lowrey
JUNE 11, 2022

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

Foster, the director of the Bixby Population Sciences Research Unit at UC San Francisco, was at a meeting of abortion providers, seeking their help recruiting people for a new study. And she was racing against time. She wanted to look, she told me, “at the last person served in, say, Nebraska, compared to the first person turned away in Nebraska.” Nearly two dozen red and purple states are expected to enact stringent limits or even bans on abortion as soon as the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is poised to do. Foster intends to study women with unwanted pregnancies just before and just after the right to an abortion vanishes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/abortion-turnaway-study-roe-supreme-court/661246/

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 – The Doctor Prescribing Abortions from Overseas

If Roe falls, then Rebecca Gomperts could become one of the most important medical figures in America.

By CHELSEA CONABOY
06/03/2022

Within a few weeks, if Roe v. Wade is overturned as expected, a Dutch doctor named Rebecca Gomperts may quickly become the most controversial abortion provider in America — even though she isn’t in America.

Gomperts and her organization, Aid Access, is already the only provider openly providing telehealth abortion in the 19 states that currently restrict access to such services; if you go the website of Plan C, a group providing information about abortion pills by mail, Aid Access is the sole provider listed for many of them.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/03/rebecca-gomperts-interview-abortion-00036742

What This Later-Abortion Story Tells Us About a Post-Roe Future

The number of people seeking later abortions is undoubtedly about to increase, and our medical system is unprepared to care for them.

By Garnet Henderson, The Nation
May 28, 2022

In October of 2021, Kristyn Smith checked herself out of the hospital in Charleston, W.Va., where she had been denied an abortion. Bleeding and in pain, Smith drove for six hours with her fiancé to Washington, D.C., to have the procedure performed there. On the day of her first appointment at the Dupont Clinic, she was 27 weeks pregnant. “They were the sweetest, most compassionate people that I had ever met,” she said of the clinic staff, who made her feel safe and supported. The seven weeks leading up to her arrival there, however, had been a “nightmare.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/later-abortion-post-roe/

28.05.2022

fatal fetal abnormality

Virginia League for Planned Parenthood

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