As with many similar (and not so similar) issues, this is ultimately a matter of trust. Whether or not to (attempt to) carry a pregnancy to term is a major decision with huge and varied long-term impacts, and potentially complicated ethical dimensions. Who do you trust to make that call: the person most impacted, with the best knowledge of their particular circumstances, or some guy, reading ethics out of a thousand year old literature anthology produced by a culture he barely understands, in a set of languages he likely cannot even name?
Skimming the paper, this looks pretty solid. The only things I can think of that'd invalidate the conclusions would be 1) the authors actually looking at 3 times that many criteria and reporting selectively, or 2) the data being entirely fabricated.
Those effects are frighteningly large — I did expect abortion denial to be bad, but not *that* bad!
That said, this isn't going to convince a pro-life person, because those effects are clearly less bad than 1 death per denied abortion, so kind of an impasse there.
I think the convinceable people here are the "squishy middle"-- people who don't feel like killing a fetus is *as bad* as killing a person, but who feel more uncomfortable with it than with using birth control. This is probably the most popular position!
I suspect you are not going to convince a lot of people on abortion, though. What you might do is get more people supporting abortion to turn out.
I also don't think your blog has much reach among people who aren't strong abortion supporters, but the graphs might be useful data for people who can reach swing voters to repost.
I've always thought that the biggest harm of banning abortion - bigger even than the very valid issues over autonomy - is that it turns women into second-class citizens. My main argument was always that it's crazy to expect any chance of establishing gender parity when one gender is at much, much more risk than the other of being de facto* forced to take responsibility for a dependent for many years.
This suggests that if anything I'd underestimated the scale of the problem. Depressing, but it's great that you published it.
(*De facto because, while theoretically women have as much right to walk about from the born child as men, realistically it's almost always the woman who ends up holding the baby.)
Diana Foster et al, found similar results. They recruited nearly 1,000 women seeking abortions at 30 facilities in 21 states. They recruited the women at abortion clinics, and compared outcomes among those who were just over the gestational limit and were denied an abortion with those who were just under the limit and had the procedure. Afterward the participants were interviewed by phone every six months for a span of five years.
The study found that women who were denied an abortion faced worse socioeconomic outcomes. Six months post-abortion request, 61% were below the poverty line compared to 45% of those who received an abortion. They were also more likely to be unemployed and reliant on financial assistance programs. Furthermore, denied women experienced increased financial distress, with their debt rising by 78% and negative public records, such as bankruptcies, increasing by 81%.
As for health, the study found more women who carried to term reported poor physical health compared to those who had an abortion. Two participants died from childbirth-related complications, while there were no abortion-related deaths. Same for mental health: There was no long-term negative mental health impact on women who had an abortion. Those denied an abortion initially experienced more anxiety and lower life satisfaction (however they didn't show any cases of severe mental health issues emerging).
I'm confused -- how can people assigned to a male judge be 5 times more likely to be on welfare, when they were only ~1.5 times more likely to have their tutelas denied?
Most people are not on welfare. Five times more can easily fit into the extra 0.5.
Imagine a hundred women:
38 of them get their abortions (the really bad cases)
42 get their abortions denied (clearly not covered under the exceptions)
20 depend on their judges' gender (the marginal cases)
The third group has way worse outcomes than the second group (if they don't get their abortions... there was something about their cases that would have made a female judge grant the abortion). As an example, if one of the 42 and five of the 20 end up on welfare, that would be a factor of five.
You're assuming that a person who gets an abortion won't go on welfare. That seems unrealistic. There are other reasons why someone would be on welfare that are not related to having a child.
No, I'm not assuming anything. This is an empirical study. The factor 5 is what they apparently found. Someone raised a theoretical objection and I showed them how the math allows for the result.
I looked into the paper, and I think I see what's happening. Ozy misreported this as outcome "being on welfare", but the outcome in the paper is actually called "Familias en Acción recipient". A quick google search shows that it's "a program that provides financial support to poverty-stricken families with underage children". This is a welfare program that targets people with young children, so people who get an abortion are going to be excluded unless they have other kids.
With this extra fact, Feeling Sentient's explanation is probably correct.
I agree this is suspicious. Not only 80% of people get exactly the same outcome in the two groups, but also many people will be on welfare even if they do get an abortion (which makes it different from e.g. complications from illegal abortions, where a 5x increase could be possible because of low base rates).
[EDIT: this paragraph is wrong][EDIT: or not?] Maybe Ozy misreported the results and the 5x increase is among the marginal 20% and not the whole group? (specifically the sentence "Pregnant people assigned to a male judge:" should say "marginal pregnant people")
> [EDIT: this paragraph is wrong] Maybe Ozy misreported the results and the 5x increase is among the marginal 20% and not the whole group? (specifically the sentence "Pregnant people assigned to a male judge:" should say "marginal pregnant people")
What makes you think this paragraph is wrong? It looks correct to me. The authors own summary is "Abortion denial increases this probability [of being on benefits] by 17.3 p.p. or 518.7%". (Although that's technically a 6x increase, there's no way that a group with 30% higher abortion denial would experience a 5x increase if abortion itself denial leads to a 6x increase.)
Wow, that’s quite a large effect! I’d still be somewhat concerned about confounders, but my guess is that it’s still a large effect. It’s so important for women to have the right to choose and affects so many areas of their lives — the current situation in the US and too many countries is abhorrent. Vote in November if you can! Thanks for sharing
The authors repeatedly use very similar number but summarize them as (e.g.) "Abortion denial increases this probability [of being on benefits] by 17.3 p.p. or 518.7%" (corresponding approximately to your 5x) or "Death records show that abortion denial increases a woman’s risk of dying within nine months by 2.5 p.p., or 161% of the non-denied mean." (corresponding approximately to your 1.6x) or "Abortion denial doubles the likelihood of women raising children".
I.e., according to the authors, these numbers are supposed to represent the effect of a marginal abortion denial, not the effects of being assigned to a male judge. (Which only has a ~20% chance of leading to an abortion denial where a female judge wouldn't also have given an abortion denial.) I assume the authors computed this _from_ the male/female judge difference, in some clever way that gets rid of confounders — but it seems like they've adjusted the numbers so that they're supposed to represent the full effect of 1 denied abortion.
"Pregnant people assigned to a male judge [1: The exact numbers are comparing male and female judges, but both comparisons have effects of similar size.]"
Isn't this basically studying the impact of giving birth on a woman's health and financial outcomes? I wish they studied the numbers from women who were denied an abortion against women who gave birth at the same age without asking for one. Giving birth is highly traumatizing for your body. Taking care of a child will harm your career and studies. It costs money so you're more likely to need some welfare. It can cause stress in your relationship and can increase the likelihood of divorce.
Rejecting abortions is obviously a shitty thing to do but... having people focus on things other than kids has negative consequences too. Colombia is now at a TFR of 1.22 and it keeps falling. They now have the same fertility rate as... Japan. The current generation of Colombians will be better off but in 30-40 years their nation will suffer horribly because they'll have too many retirees and not enough workers. And unlike the US and Europe they'll never have enough people interested in moving there for work, so they won't be able to close the gap with immigrants.
I assume that people who have choices tend to chose have children when the negative impact is much smaller. children cost money, so people who have choice wait until they have enough money to not being poor. pregnancy is costly in health, so people make sure they have access to healthcare.
in mu world model, unplanned pregnancy that end with a baby is much more costly then planned one. the costs of child can vary wildly depending on circumstances.
Good reasonable study. Unfortunately, facts can't overcome feelings. And on the anti-abortion side, that's what they have; they may be anti-gay, anti-science, anti-feminist, anti-civil rights, and anti-peace, but at least they're not SATANIC BABY KILLERS. It's not a coincidence that the religious right's embrace of forced birth came after their previous opposition to civil rights got too toxic. American Christianity is founded on the bedrock of We Are Better Than Those Sinners, and finding themselves on the WRONG side of the most important moral issue of the century just because they didn't give in to those uppity communist blacks stung a few egos.
It's hardly that. (Why would we, the children of your nightmares, consider being anti-all-those-things a good thing?)
"we must mitigate these genuinely bad social problems, but first, we must blow up the gas chambers" is actually an entirely coherent and rational response.
I"m just describing my time in the anti-abortion movement. Self-righteous wankery. Claim to be against something, while doing nothing that would actually change the status quo (thoughts and prayers).
Of course, you want the REAL Christian attitude towards abortion, look up the article "The only moral abortion is my abortion."
I am aware of women who have abortions and rationalize them.
But this is "children of your nightmares". I am a man who will never be pregnant, so I will never be tempted that way.
More generally, I have more right to speak to Christianity's successes than you have to its failures.
(I would also like to note that "blow up the gas chambers" is a historical reference to something that happened during the Holocaust, not a policy proposal regarding abortion.)
If pro-life voters were consistently in favor of easily accessible birth control and early education about safe sex, I might agree. As it stands, major pro-life groups also fight policies supporting these ends. I do not know your views, but the pro-life movement as a whole has a revealed preference for more than just preventing the destruction of fetuses.
Even then, if there's any major priorities about what a post-abortion world would look like other than no longer having abortion, it may have influence on what particularly is used to bring about the end of abortion.
Well yeah, I and other liberals choose to decrease abortions by attacking the root cause of unwanted pregnancies because we prioritize women not having to bear and raise unwanted children. Thus, a post- or very low- abortion world brought about by liberals would meet these goals to a threshold such that abortion is incredibly rare or unheard of. What are your priorities and what would you use to reach your goals?
To include one of your other comments, if you have an issue with funding birth control because the money will find its way to Planned Parenthood, why not build a conservative reproductive care provider that does everything it does except abortions (or abortions outside whatever conditions you find acceptable)? You could defang one of the biggest criticisms of the pro-life movement, present a credible claim to abortion swing voters that siding with you doesn't mean a full repeal of reproductive freedom, and provide birth control services you find acceptable in red states where Planned Parenthood has been de-facto banned by state-level abortion laws. The only reason I can see for this institution not to exist is that the pro-life movement refuses to consider any kind of meaningful compromise or activism outside of harassing Planned Parenthood patients.
The mere fact that birth control and sexual education that leads to prevention of unintended pregnancy funges against abortion, doesn't mean that these things provide a path to criminalizing or successfully eliminating abortion, especially given that Planned Parenthood is deeply invested politically in the continued legality of abortion.
This seems like it would be heavily confounded by intelligence. More intelligent people write better requests and are more likely to have higher SES statues, explaining both ends of this correlation.
The variable that was targeted was whether the tutelas were (randomly) assigned to male or female judges, so the intelligence of the request writer would make no difference.
As with many similar (and not so similar) issues, this is ultimately a matter of trust. Whether or not to (attempt to) carry a pregnancy to term is a major decision with huge and varied long-term impacts, and potentially complicated ethical dimensions. Who do you trust to make that call: the person most impacted, with the best knowledge of their particular circumstances, or some guy, reading ethics out of a thousand year old literature anthology produced by a culture he barely understands, in a set of languages he likely cannot even name?
Had no idea about tutelas, a really intriguing concept. Great post.
Skimming the paper, this looks pretty solid. The only things I can think of that'd invalidate the conclusions would be 1) the authors actually looking at 3 times that many criteria and reporting selectively, or 2) the data being entirely fabricated.
Those effects are frighteningly large — I did expect abortion denial to be bad, but not *that* bad!
That said, this isn't going to convince a pro-life person, because those effects are clearly less bad than 1 death per denied abortion, so kind of an impasse there.
I think the convinceable people here are the "squishy middle"-- people who don't feel like killing a fetus is *as bad* as killing a person, but who feel more uncomfortable with it than with using birth control. This is probably the most popular position!
Right, I think abortion should only be used in dire situations, such as someone being pregnant.
Pretty much.
I suspect you are not going to convince a lot of people on abortion, though. What you might do is get more people supporting abortion to turn out.
I also don't think your blog has much reach among people who aren't strong abortion supporters, but the graphs might be useful data for people who can reach swing voters to repost.
I've always thought that the biggest harm of banning abortion - bigger even than the very valid issues over autonomy - is that it turns women into second-class citizens. My main argument was always that it's crazy to expect any chance of establishing gender parity when one gender is at much, much more risk than the other of being de facto* forced to take responsibility for a dependent for many years.
This suggests that if anything I'd underestimated the scale of the problem. Depressing, but it's great that you published it.
(*De facto because, while theoretically women have as much right to walk about from the born child as men, realistically it's almost always the woman who ends up holding the baby.)
Fr the anti-abortionists, that's a feature.
It is not a feature.
Diana Foster et al, found similar results. They recruited nearly 1,000 women seeking abortions at 30 facilities in 21 states. They recruited the women at abortion clinics, and compared outcomes among those who were just over the gestational limit and were denied an abortion with those who were just under the limit and had the procedure. Afterward the participants were interviewed by phone every six months for a span of five years.
The study found that women who were denied an abortion faced worse socioeconomic outcomes. Six months post-abortion request, 61% were below the poverty line compared to 45% of those who received an abortion. They were also more likely to be unemployed and reliant on financial assistance programs. Furthermore, denied women experienced increased financial distress, with their debt rising by 78% and negative public records, such as bankruptcies, increasing by 81%.
As for health, the study found more women who carried to term reported poor physical health compared to those who had an abortion. Two participants died from childbirth-related complications, while there were no abortion-related deaths. Same for mental health: There was no long-term negative mental health impact on women who had an abortion. Those denied an abortion initially experienced more anxiety and lower life satisfaction (however they didn't show any cases of severe mental health issues emerging).
https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study
I'm confused -- how can people assigned to a male judge be 5 times more likely to be on welfare, when they were only ~1.5 times more likely to have their tutelas denied?
Most people are not on welfare. Five times more can easily fit into the extra 0.5.
Imagine a hundred women:
38 of them get their abortions (the really bad cases)
42 get their abortions denied (clearly not covered under the exceptions)
20 depend on their judges' gender (the marginal cases)
The third group has way worse outcomes than the second group (if they don't get their abortions... there was something about their cases that would have made a female judge grant the abortion). As an example, if one of the 42 and five of the 20 end up on welfare, that would be a factor of five.
I messed that up? Four of the twenty, for a total of five, haha.
You're assuming that a person who gets an abortion won't go on welfare. That seems unrealistic. There are other reasons why someone would be on welfare that are not related to having a child.
No, I'm not assuming anything. This is an empirical study. The factor 5 is what they apparently found. Someone raised a theoretical objection and I showed them how the math allows for the result.
I looked into the paper, and I think I see what's happening. Ozy misreported this as outcome "being on welfare", but the outcome in the paper is actually called "Familias en Acción recipient". A quick google search shows that it's "a program that provides financial support to poverty-stricken families with underage children". This is a welfare program that targets people with young children, so people who get an abortion are going to be excluded unless they have other kids.
With this extra fact, Feeling Sentient's explanation is probably correct.
I agree this is suspicious. Not only 80% of people get exactly the same outcome in the two groups, but also many people will be on welfare even if they do get an abortion (which makes it different from e.g. complications from illegal abortions, where a 5x increase could be possible because of low base rates).
[EDIT: this paragraph is wrong][EDIT: or not?] Maybe Ozy misreported the results and the 5x increase is among the marginal 20% and not the whole group? (specifically the sentence "Pregnant people assigned to a male judge:" should say "marginal pregnant people")
> [EDIT: this paragraph is wrong] Maybe Ozy misreported the results and the 5x increase is among the marginal 20% and not the whole group? (specifically the sentence "Pregnant people assigned to a male judge:" should say "marginal pregnant people")
What makes you think this paragraph is wrong? It looks correct to me. The authors own summary is "Abortion denial increases this probability [of being on benefits] by 17.3 p.p. or 518.7%". (Although that's technically a 6x increase, there's no way that a group with 30% higher abortion denial would experience a 5x increase if abortion itself denial leads to a 6x increase.)
Okay, now I'm even more confused about this paper.
Wow, that’s quite a large effect! I’d still be somewhat concerned about confounders, but my guess is that it’s still a large effect. It’s so important for women to have the right to choose and affects so many areas of their lives — the current situation in the US and too many countries is abhorrent. Vote in November if you can! Thanks for sharing
> Pregnant people assigned to a male judge: ...
I think there's a mistake here?
The authors repeatedly use very similar number but summarize them as (e.g.) "Abortion denial increases this probability [of being on benefits] by 17.3 p.p. or 518.7%" (corresponding approximately to your 5x) or "Death records show that abortion denial increases a woman’s risk of dying within nine months by 2.5 p.p., or 161% of the non-denied mean." (corresponding approximately to your 1.6x) or "Abortion denial doubles the likelihood of women raising children".
I.e., according to the authors, these numbers are supposed to represent the effect of a marginal abortion denial, not the effects of being assigned to a male judge. (Which only has a ~20% chance of leading to an abortion denial where a female judge wouldn't also have given an abortion denial.) I assume the authors computed this _from_ the male/female judge difference, in some clever way that gets rid of confounders — but it seems like they've adjusted the numbers so that they're supposed to represent the full effect of 1 denied abortion.
I don't understand footnote 1.
"Pregnant people assigned to a male judge [1: The exact numbers are comparing male and female judges, but both comparisons have effects of similar size.]"
What is "both comparisons" referring to?
Isn't this basically studying the impact of giving birth on a woman's health and financial outcomes? I wish they studied the numbers from women who were denied an abortion against women who gave birth at the same age without asking for one. Giving birth is highly traumatizing for your body. Taking care of a child will harm your career and studies. It costs money so you're more likely to need some welfare. It can cause stress in your relationship and can increase the likelihood of divorce.
Rejecting abortions is obviously a shitty thing to do but... having people focus on things other than kids has negative consequences too. Colombia is now at a TFR of 1.22 and it keeps falling. They now have the same fertility rate as... Japan. The current generation of Colombians will be better off but in 30-40 years their nation will suffer horribly because they'll have too many retirees and not enough workers. And unlike the US and Europe they'll never have enough people interested in moving there for work, so they won't be able to close the gap with immigrants.
I assume that people who have choices tend to chose have children when the negative impact is much smaller. children cost money, so people who have choice wait until they have enough money to not being poor. pregnancy is costly in health, so people make sure they have access to healthcare.
in mu world model, unplanned pregnancy that end with a baby is much more costly then planned one. the costs of child can vary wildly depending on circumstances.
Good reasonable study. Unfortunately, facts can't overcome feelings. And on the anti-abortion side, that's what they have; they may be anti-gay, anti-science, anti-feminist, anti-civil rights, and anti-peace, but at least they're not SATANIC BABY KILLERS. It's not a coincidence that the religious right's embrace of forced birth came after their previous opposition to civil rights got too toxic. American Christianity is founded on the bedrock of We Are Better Than Those Sinners, and finding themselves on the WRONG side of the most important moral issue of the century just because they didn't give in to those uppity communist blacks stung a few egos.
It's hardly that. (Why would we, the children of your nightmares, consider being anti-all-those-things a good thing?)
"we must mitigate these genuinely bad social problems, but first, we must blow up the gas chambers" is actually an entirely coherent and rational response.
I"m just describing my time in the anti-abortion movement. Self-righteous wankery. Claim to be against something, while doing nothing that would actually change the status quo (thoughts and prayers).
Of course, you want the REAL Christian attitude towards abortion, look up the article "The only moral abortion is my abortion."
I am aware of women who have abortions and rationalize them.
But this is "children of your nightmares". I am a man who will never be pregnant, so I will never be tempted that way.
More generally, I have more right to speak to Christianity's successes than you have to its failures.
(I would also like to note that "blow up the gas chambers" is a historical reference to something that happened during the Holocaust, not a policy proposal regarding abortion.)
If pro-life voters were consistently in favor of easily accessible birth control and early education about safe sex, I might agree. As it stands, major pro-life groups also fight policies supporting these ends. I do not know your views, but the pro-life movement as a whole has a revealed preference for more than just preventing the destruction of fetuses.
A common argument from more radical cultural pro-lifers is that these policies actually perpetuate abortion.
A common empirical finding is that they are wrong.
Even then, if there's any major priorities about what a post-abortion world would look like other than no longer having abortion, it may have influence on what particularly is used to bring about the end of abortion.
Well yeah, I and other liberals choose to decrease abortions by attacking the root cause of unwanted pregnancies because we prioritize women not having to bear and raise unwanted children. Thus, a post- or very low- abortion world brought about by liberals would meet these goals to a threshold such that abortion is incredibly rare or unheard of. What are your priorities and what would you use to reach your goals?
To include one of your other comments, if you have an issue with funding birth control because the money will find its way to Planned Parenthood, why not build a conservative reproductive care provider that does everything it does except abortions (or abortions outside whatever conditions you find acceptable)? You could defang one of the biggest criticisms of the pro-life movement, present a credible claim to abortion swing voters that siding with you doesn't mean a full repeal of reproductive freedom, and provide birth control services you find acceptable in red states where Planned Parenthood has been de-facto banned by state-level abortion laws. The only reason I can see for this institution not to exist is that the pro-life movement refuses to consider any kind of meaningful compromise or activism outside of harassing Planned Parenthood patients.
Yes. Planned Parenthood (via sex ed and birth control) does more to prevent abortions than any of the sign-waving wackaloons outside.
The mere fact that birth control and sexual education that leads to prevention of unintended pregnancy funges against abortion, doesn't mean that these things provide a path to criminalizing or successfully eliminating abortion, especially given that Planned Parenthood is deeply invested politically in the continued legality of abortion.
This seems like it would be heavily confounded by intelligence. More intelligent people write better requests and are more likely to have higher SES statues, explaining both ends of this correlation.
The variable that was targeted was whether the tutelas were (randomly) assigned to male or female judges, so the intelligence of the request writer would make no difference.
Thanks for the write-up. I couldn’t share your post to my socials, but I made a post about the study.