Abortion researcher Tracy Weitz discusses the ongoing Turnaway Study, which examines the long-term outcomes for women who seek out abortions but can’t get them:
The take-home from that study is that most women are having an abortion because they say they can’t afford to have a child. And it turns out that they’re right: Two years later, women who had a baby they weren’t expecting to have, compared to the women who had the abortion they wanted, are three times more likely to be living in poverty. They knew they couldn’t afford a kid and it turns out they were correct. … The study has really exposed how hard it is to be a parent in this country. It is a huge economic investment. And if you don’t have the economic resources to be a parent, there’s nothing to help you.
Eyal Press looks at access to contraception to explain why poor women are more likely than others to have abortions:
Low-income women tend to have less access to the most reliable forms of birth control—in particular, long-acting intrauterine devices (I.U.D.s), which are extremely effective, and which the new Guttmacher study touted as a potential factor behind the recent decline in the over-all abortion rate. …
Thanks to publicly funded family-planning services provided to poor women under Title X—a federal program that House Republicans have repeatedly tried to eliminate—there is evidence that more low-income women have been using I.U.D.s in the past decade. But the total number of users is still small, and the cost, which can exceed a thousand dollars before insertion, remains prohibitive for many low-income women who don’t qualify for Medicaid and cannot afford private insurance. “We know that cost is a major factor in a woman’s ability to choose and access a method of contraception that works best for her, and behind the cost is access to health-insurance coverage,” Kinsey Hasstedt, a public-policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, told me.
The Dish 