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. … 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. …
When Alito’s draft surfaced, Foster told me, “I was struck by how little it considered the people who would be affected. The experience of someone who’s pregnant when they do not want to be and what happens to their life is absolutely not considered in that document.” Foster’s earlier work provides detailed insight into what does happen. The landmark Turnaway Study, which she led, is a crystal ball into our post-Roe future and, I would argue, the single most important piece of academic research in American life at this moment.
The legal and political debate about abortion in recent decades has tended to focus more on the rights and experience of embryos and fetuses than the people who gestate them. And some commentators—including ones seated on the Supreme Court—have speculated that termination is not just a cruel convenience, but one that harms women too. Foster and her colleagues rigorously tested that notion. Their research demonstrates that, in general, abortion does not wound women physically, psychologically, or financially. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term does. CONTINUED
Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
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