Almost all of the states that produce the most unfavorable economic and health care outcomes for children are among those poised to ban or severely restrict access to abortion if the Supreme Court overturns the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.
That pattern underscores the paradox that the states most committed to requiring women to carry pregnancies to term tend to invest the least in the health and economic security of expectant mothers and children after they are born. …
The concentration of anti-abortion statutes in states that produce poor outcomes for kids reflects the changing alignment of politics over the issue since the Supreme Court established the nationwide right to abortion in the 1973 Roe decision, says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the Florida State University law school and author of the recent book “Abortion and the Law in America.” The correlation results from “the political realignment about abortion, which took a while after Roe,” she says. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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