They found that a year after the event, the women who were turned away from an abortion were more likely to rely on government assistance, more likely to be living beneath the poverty line, and less likely to have a full-time job than the women in the study who had obtained abortions. They also registered more anxiety a week after they were denied an abortion and reported more stress a year out. They were no more or less likely to be depressed. And women who gave birth suffered from more serious health complications—from hemorrhaging to a fractured pelvis—than the women who aborted, even later in their pregnancies.
Happy home lives also failed to materialize. The women who were turned away were more than twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as those who were able to abort. The researchers found that “a year after being denied an abortion, 7 percent reported an incident of domestic violence in the last six months,” compared to 3 percent of the women who received abortions. The researchers concluded that this “wasn’t because the turnaways were more likely to get into abusive relationships,” but that “getting abortions allowed women to get out of such relationships more easily.” Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term helped abusive men stay in these women’s lives, but it didn’t encourage delinquent new dads to stick around: The researchers found that “men were no more likely to live with a turnaway who’d borne their children than they were to live with a woman who had an abortion.”
The abortion debate often focuses on a woman’s health during those first nine months. This study shows that an unwanted pregnancy can have long-lasting effects on a woman’s body and well-being far after she carries it to term.
—
Amanda Hess writing at Slate about ANSIRH’s Turnaway Study. For more, io9’s write up and the Global Turnaway Study’s Facebook page.
[NB: More people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care.]
(via keepyourbsoutofmyuterus)
(Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus-blog, via kogiopsis)
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