Science Vs - Abortion: The Science and the Supreme Court

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And in their opinion, we found a lot of scientific-sounding statements. So we wanted to find out whether these statements are true. We’ll tell you what actually happens in an abortion, whether a fetus can feel pain, and what the risks are for a pregnant person. We visit an abortion clinic in Texas and talk to Dr. Amita Murthy, Dr. Lisa Harris, and Dr. Diana Greene Foster. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3OBfveK This episode was produced by Heather Rogers, Meryl Horn, Wendy Zukerman, Ben Kuebrich, Kaitlyn Sawrey, Shruti Ravindran, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Extra help with production and editorial from Rachel Ward, Alex Blumberg and Jorge Just. Music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord, Catherine Anderson and Emma Munger. Thanks to Dr. Lola Pellegrino, Ronnie Shankar, Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper, Rachel Jones, Elizabeth Nash, Dr Yoon-Jin Kim, Delma Limones. and Gilda Sedgh. Also thanks to Katie Bishop and Reverend David Gushee.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against 49 years of abortion law. We were on a break and coming back with new episodes in September. But then, last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which means that states in the U.S. can now be much stricter with abortions, and about half the states are expected to make it harder or nearly impossible to get an abortion. And being a science show and all that,

what we noticed is that the Supreme Court said a bunch of statements about abortions. Scientific-sounding statements. They talked about fetuses feeling pain and said that during abortions, doctors can use surgical instruments to, quote, crush and tear the unborn child apart, end quote. They also said it could be dangerous to get an abortion. So is any of that true?

Well, it turns out that we covered a lot of these points in an episode that we made on abortion a few years ago. We looked into how developed most embryos are when they get aborted and what exactly goes on during the different kinds of abortions. So we've updated that episode, adding new science to give you the very latest on what we know here. And we've also looked into the science of some of the expected consequences of this ruling. And you should know that this episode, it isn't pro-choice or pro-life. It's pro-facts.

Scouts on her. When it comes to abortion, there are a lot of misconceptions about aborting a conception. But then there's science. Science Versus is coming up. Metrolinx and Crosslinx are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best.

Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI.

Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the science of abortions, something that quite a lot of people get in the U.S. According to the CDC, more than 600,000 abortions happened in 2019,

and it's estimated that roughly one in four women in America will have an abortion in their lifetime. Our first question today is this. When most people get an abortion, how developed is the fetus? Because this is something that came up a few times in the majority opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, which was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Like, they said that fingernails and toenails begin to form at 10 weeks.

And in pop culture, fetuses having fingernails also seems to come up. Like in that movie Juno, you know, the indie film about a teenager getting pregnant. Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails. Fingernails? Really?

Really? Really? Well, it is true that fingernails and toenails begin to develop after around 10 weeks gestation. But what that means is that there's these flat spots at the end of fingertips. Actual nails don't pop up until around 32 weeks gestation. Well, fingernails is the last. That's like when we think about a baby coming out with fingernails, that's not happening until closer, much closer to the end. That's Dr. Amita Murthy. When we spoke to her, she was an assistant professor in obstetrics and gynecology at New York University. She taught med students about fetal development. What's your favourite stage of it?

Do you have a favourite? That's the wrong question to ask me. Why? Because you love them all? I love them all. Okay, so let's start at the very beginning. When two people love each other very much. Okay, who are we kidding? Let's start here. The sperm is in the vagina and it makes a beeline for the egg. If it breaks through, fertilization begins. Amita told us that after the egg is fertilized by sperm, it divides into two cells and those cells divide into more cells until it creates this ball of cells. Microscopically, it looks like a wriggling ball. The cells are dividing and separating. That wriggling ball will soon divide into what Amita called an inner cell mass and an outer cell mass.

The inner cell mass is now actually multiple cell layers deep. We're talking about 30, 40, 50 cell layers deep. So it's like if you can imagine like a sandwich with lots and lots and lots of lots of meat layers in there and cheese or whatever. So it's like that. And then imagine like you start to roll the sandwich into a burrito kind of thing. Right. Okay. to a burrito kind of thing. Right, OK. So what Amita is describing here is that ball of cells, the sandwich.

It's folding in on itself to create that distinctive shape of a fetus, the kind of curve. Or as she describes it, the burrito. So all this is happening in the first few weeks and this burrito, sandwich, whatever thing that Amita is describing, it's really just a tiny, tiny clump of cells. And by this point, many people who are pregnant actually don't know what's cooking inside. They don't know they're pregnant just yet.

In fact, it's only once you've missed a period, weeks after the sperm has met the egg, that you might take a pregnancy test. OK, so according to the CDC, the majority of abortions happen in the first eight weeks or so. And when they say eight weeks, they're actually using what's called gestational age, which means the clock starts running from the first day of your last period, which obviously would have been before you actually got pregnant. But often doctors don't know which stoop made the pregnancy.

So this is what they use and what we'll use. Right. So we're at eight weeks. At this point, this little thing cooking, it's an embryo. It won't be a fetus for several weeks now. And this embryo, it's about 15 millimetres, which is roughly the size of a pumpkin seed. And the pumpkin seed, it has some teeny tiny little organs, including a teeny tiny heart. It'll start out as a two-chamber muscle and then starts to become a three and then a four

chamber muscle. And it is moving. And once it starts moving quickly, that's when it starts pushing blood through the fetal body. You have a fully formed tiny little heart, four chambers. When you say tiny little, how little are we talking? I mean, we're talking microscopic. And it can do that stuff. Yeah, it can do that stuff. It's kind of amazing. You can't see it with the naked eye, and yet it's pumping blood around the embryo's body.

Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. Okay, so Juno got that heart thing right. It can feel pain. And then there's this question of whether a fetus can feel pain. And this comes up a lot, not just in indie films featuring Michael Cera. Yeah, he was in Juno. Anyway, it also came up in the Supreme Court opinion. They were basically working off the assumption that a fetus can feel pain.

So, can they? Well, this is a tricky question to answer. I need to view the fetus, unfortunately. No, you can't interview a fetus, but there have been studies done in animals, brain scans, brain wave studies done on prematurely delivered babies, observation, dissection in like cadavers, things like that. So using these types of studies, Amita says that as best as science can tell, there are several steps that are needed for a fetus or anyone to feel pain. First, you need to have pain receptors, which are sensors that can detect something painful, and then they kind of create this electrical pain signal. Second, you need to have nerve fibers

that connect that pain signal to the spinal cord and up into the brain. And finally, you need to have a brain that's developed enough to process that pain signal. So let's go through it. When do all of these things start happening? When do the pain receptors start to form? So that's pretty early. Amita tells us that at around six weeks, nerve fibres start to be found in the skin.

They can sense touch, vibration and temperature. But these early nerves, they can't sense pain. That's according to a detailed report on fetal pain and awareness published by the UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. That report said that immature pain receptors start forming at 10 weeks or so and until then, quote, pain is clearly not possible, end quote.

Now, Amita says that all that these pain receptors do at this point is create an electrical signal that says, ouch. To actually feel that ouch, we need the wiring that can send those signals to the spinal cord and up into the brain. When do we get that wiring? Well, we know that from about 18 to 20 weeks,

a fetus will respond if you accidentally poke it with a needle, which Amita says you might do, say, during a procedure called an amniocentesis. So, for example, if you're doing an amniocentesis and you mistakenly hit the hand, the fetus will move the hand away. But to Amita, that reflex response is very, very different to pain. That is reflex, but the understanding that something sharp has hit and that it is bad and that that bad sensation is pain is not there. How can we be sure?

Because we know that there's no cortex at that time. And we need the cortex to feel that pain. We need the cortex to understand that that is pain. You don't need the cortex for the reflexive action, but to understand that that is a bad thing and then that bad thing is pain, you need the cortex for. Which brings us to the final stage of development that many researchers think is needed to be able to feel pain. Our complex cortex.

That is that thick, wrinkly part of the brain that many of us think of when we're thinking of a brain. You don't get real cortex until the end of the second trimester, and the completion of connections, like, through the midbrain, lower brain, into the cortex doesn't happen until 26 to 28 weeks. By now, the fetus is really getting along. Amita says that at 24 weeks, or around six months, the wiring is getting along. Amita says that at 24 weeks or around six months, the wiring is getting connected. And this is why that Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists report concluded

that this, quote, implies pain is not possible until after 24 weeks. According to the CDC, in 2019, 99% of abortions in the US happened before this time. So when it comes to fetuses feeling pain, the best evidence we have tells us for virtually all abortions, this isn't happening. All right. Now, let's find out what happens during an abortion. Because in that majority opinion, Justice Alito said that laws about abortion have to balance interests, which included, quote, the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures, end quote. So how gruesome is an abortion? For this, we're talking to Lisa Harris,

a researcher at the University of Michigan who's also an obstetrician and gynecologist. And as part of her work as an obs and gyne, Lisa performs abortions, which means she gets a bit of hate mail. I jokingly call them love letters, but, you know, it's hate mail. There are actually a lot of touching responses that people are genuinely sort of worried about me, worried that, you know, I'll go to hell. And a lot of people pray for me as well.

And I actually find that kind of beautiful and touching. Yeah, I feel exactly the same way about my Twitter trolls. Beautiful and touching. Okay, so pregnancies are divided into three trimesters. Each one goes for about three months. As we've mentioned, the vast majority of abortions happen in the first trimester. And Lisa tells us that there are two main ways that you can get an abortion at this early stage. One is called a medication abortion. It can generally be done up to about 11 weeks. And there are a couple of ways to do this, but Lisa described one that involves taking two pills to terminate the pregnancy.

The first pill is called mifepristone. You might have heard this called RU486. And in the last week since this decision, searches for this stuff on Google have been skyrocketing. So here's what it does. It blocks one of the hormones that is important for sustaining a pregnancy. The hormone being blocked is progesterone, which normally tells the body, hey, we're pregnant, baby on board.

But mifepristone, the abortion drug, it interferes with how progesterone works. So it no longer tells your body, hey, you're pregnant. And instead, the body thinks, huh, I must not be pregnant after all. So that hormone progesterone doesn't work anymore and the pregnancy stops growing. And now you can take another pill to help your body get rid of the pregnancy, as well as the placenta and the stuff around it. This drug is called misoprostol. Women can dissolve it just in their cheek.

They can dissolve it in their vagina. They can swallow it. And this pill mimics the process of having a miscarriage. The uterus contracts and the cervix opens and there's a lot of cramping and bleeding and the pregnancy is expelled by the uterus. It's the same process that would happen if a woman was having a miscarriage at home. It's not fun taking these drugs. They cause cramps and bleeding.

Some people feel nauseated and might vomit. But Lisa says these drugs are safe. One study of more than 11,000 medical abortions found that 5% had complications and the vast majority of those were minor. Another study looking at first trimester medical abortions found that doing them at home was just as safe as doing them in the clinic. And by the way, these pills often get confused

for the morning after pill or plan B. And in fact, in the wake of this Roe v. Wade decision, a hospital system in Missouri got confused. At first, they said it would stop giving people the morning-after pill because of the state's abortion ban. They've since changed course. Because the fact is that these pills are super different to abortion meds. Plan B isn't shutting down a pregnancy.

It just delays ovulation, which means that the sperm can't get anywhere near your eggs in the first place. And regular old birth control pills? They pause ovulation entirely. OK, so now let's talk about the second kind of abortion that you can get in the first three months. It's when a doctor removes the pregnancy. It's also known as a surgical abortion. And we've got to get one thing straight up front. No one is cutting you open. A lot of people don't understand their anatomy, so don't understand that there is actually already a natural opening, that abortion doesn't involve cutting or opening any spaces that aren't already opened.

And that opening is the vagina. It's like a tunnel straight to the cervix, which is like the trapdoor to the uterus. And that's where the fetus is coming out of. So when Lisa is doing an abortion, she has to open up the cervix. Some people use a medication to soften and open the cervix beforehand. Some people use these very gently tapered rods that are called dilators to open the cervix. And then once the cervix is open, Lisa can remove the pregnancy. And she can do it in a couple of ways.

Many of the devices use suction. Just a handheld vacuum device that looks kind of like a big syringe or instruments that are kind of like tongs or graspers. And a physician can reach in and remove the pregnancy that way. Lisa, explain the process to reporter Heather Rogers. How long does that take? Anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes. Okay, that's not very long.

No, it's really not. People imagine that, you know, it's a whole day of something happening in their body and it's not. In most cases, it's very quick. And if this pregnancy is in the first trimester, what Lisa can see doesn't look like a baby at all. As she's peeking into the vagina, you can see the lining of the uterus. And then you would see something that looks like a tiny cotton ball, kind of a whitish, fluffy tissue. Then that's the placenta and the amniotic sac. You can't really see a fetus or fetal parts until about 10 weeks. So that is an abortion in the first trimester, when the vast majority of abortions are happening.

But what about for a later abortion? Well, Lisa told us that the longer you wait, the harder it is to use the pills or suction. And by around the second trimester, you may have to use other instruments, like forceps. This is called a dilation and evacuation, or DNA. And heads up, we are going to get detailed here. That involves using the instrument to reach into the uterus and remove the fetus,

and generally it is removed in parts, meaning it's dismembered during the process. And yeah, when it feels or looks like the uterus is empty, you're done. And while this is Lisa's job, there was this one day that stuck out. She was about four months pregnant with her first child, and she gave an abortion to a woman who was about as pregnant as she was. And while Lisa was performing the procedure, she felt her baby kick. It was one of the first times it had happened.

And she told Heather that it really took her by surprise. It was the feeling that I could feel a fetus kicking, moving inside of me at the same time that I was removing a fetus. And it was something in that juxtaposition that was overwhelming. And I just found myself kind of crying. How did you wipe your tears away? Well, I couldn't because I had sterile gloves on and I was in the middle of a procedure. So they just rolled down my face.

You never had that experience? I never had that experience before. And part of it, as I think about it now, I think I was so happy to be pregnant and so much wanted to be a mother. And I remember feeling just so privileged that I could be a mother and that I was getting ready with my family to welcome a child. And remember thinking how, what it meant that not everybody could do that for whatever reason. And remember just feeling fortunate. Now, the one kind of abortion that we haven't talked about yet

are those that happen in the third trimester, after six months of pregnancy. These are extremely rare. The best statistic we could find from the CDC is that around 1% of abortions in the US happen after around five months. An abortion clinic in Colorado says that these late abortions are almost always because serious complications developed, mostly because the woman discovered that the fetus had some kind of serious abnormality. that it can be hard. You're probably not going to sit around getting nausea,

heartburn, constipation, sore boobs, leg cramps, just to decide at six months, willy-nilly, nah, I don't want this. That is, unless something serious has happened. That said, the process of getting a third trimester abortion, it's similar to a second trimester one, except that the fetus is further along now. So in these later term abortions,

you often have to inject the fetus with a drug that will stop its heart, and then you often have to induce labour. Sometimes these steps can happen in a second trimester abortion too. After the break, we're heading to an abortion clinic in Texas to find out why people are getting abortions in the first place. Plus, we're looking to our science crystal ball to see what this ruling might mean for abortions in the US. Coming up. Welcome back. So we've learned how abortions work.

Now, let's find out why we're getting them. Several years ago, reporter Heather Rogers headed to an abortion clinic in San Antonio, Texas, called Whole Woman's Health. Whole Woman's Health, how can I help you? Hi, Heather. Hi, Wendy. So before we look into the studies on why women are getting abortions, can you just tell me a little bit about this clinic? Like, who was in the waiting room? What age group are we talking about? It was surprising because most of the women in the waiting room when I was there, like, there were some teenagers there, but the women were older.

I mean, they were in their 20s. Some looked, to me, definitely in their 30s. And there were even a couple who looked like they were in their 40s. And what is, does that stack up with the data on this? So that does line up with the data that we found. And what, what that shows is that most women who have abortions are in their 20s and 30s. How many of these women already had kids? 60%. 60% of women getting abortions in America are already moms. They're already moms. They already have kids. And did you get to speak to some women there? Yeah, I talked to a couple women. And why were they getting abortions?

It was interesting. They were getting abortions because one woman told me she just wasn't ready to have a child. And the other woman told me that she already has a daughter and she's about to join the Air Force and she doesn't have the money for it. It's expensive. It's so much more expensive than people think and it's so much more work than people think and I just am not ready for that right now. Again, I'm not. It's always hard when you go to one clinic

and do we know if this is representative of what's happening across America? Right, right. So, like, does the specific represent the general broader picture? Right. So, this clinic, it does, actually, in many ways, not in every way. So, there's this study from 2013 that looked at almost 1,000 women who wanted abortions, and it found that 40% of them wanted abortions for financial reasons.

So, they had financial problems or they couldn't afford to support a child. And that was the biggest reason. That was the most common reason that women gave. Another common reason was that the timing wasn't right and they just weren't ready to care for a child. Almost a third of the women who got abortions, they got them for, quote-unquote, partner-related reasons. What that means is that they didn't have a good or supportive relationship with the man who got abortions, they got them for, quote-unquote, partner-related reasons. What that means is that they didn't have a good or supportive relationship with a man who got them pregnant. And in some cases, these men were physically abusive. So, some women spoke to me, but then the clinic has

these journals. And the women who come through who get abortions can write entries in those journals. And they let us flip through some of these journals. So you're going to hear Rachel Ward. She was with me. She's a producer. We went to Texas together. This is not a baby. It's an embryo slash blood clot slash thick cell that can really alter a person's life. So this woman, she said she's never been faced with such a decision. She's been raised not believing in abortion and always preached to others that unless you were a victim of rape or having this baby would result in death, then it was not right.

This is not your decision to make. Only God can take a life. The reason she's here is because she's a single mom of two children. She says that she does it and they live comfortably, but she doesn't know if she can make it alone with three small kids. I will walk out of here and no longer be pregnant and go home and love my two babies just as much as I did before I walked into this place. I just hope that I am still allowed to walk into heaven one day.

May God see my pain and my struggle and may God be with me and you. Bye-bye. Yeah. What about this religious aspect? You really don't hear a lot about women who say they are religious getting abortions. Yeah. So there's this data from the Guttmacher Institute, and it says that almost 25%, about a quarter of all women who get abortions, these are 2014 numbers, identified as Catholic.

A quarter? Yeah, it's pretty surprising. And then in addition to that, 17% of women who got abortions that year identified as what they called mainline Protestant. And then 13% more identified as evangelical Protestant. Right. So let's leave Texas and Heather. Bye, Heather.

Bye, Wendy. The clinic that Heather visited closed in 2019, and Whole Women's Health said in a statement that the rest of their overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that we have to protect maternal health and safety. So we wanted to know, what are the risks here? Now, one of the big fears that people have is that an abortion will make them infertile. But according to the UK's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, as well as the US National Academies of Science, this isn't a thing. Both of them looked at the research into this, and they found that if you

have an abortion in a safe and legal setting, then there is no link between getting an abortion and being infertile. You may have heard concerns about breast cancer, but the best research we could find, including one analysis of 53 studies, including 83,000 women who had breast cancer, found that getting an abortion does not increase your chance of getting breast cancer. You can expect bleeding after an abortion, and very rarely people can actually bleed quite a lot to the point where they could be hospitalized. You can also get an infection. A big Finnish study found that it happened in less than 2% of abortions. And one thing that was mentioned in the dissenting Supreme Court opinion,

so the one that disagreed with the majority, is that it's more dangerous to carry a pregnancy to term than to have an abortion. And this is true. There's an incredibly small risk of death from an abortion. But according to an analysis of CDC data, you are way more likely, like 13 times more likely to die from childbirth than an abortion. By the way, you're also more likely to die from some dental procedures and even plastic surgery compared to having an abortion. And this new ruling has made some experts really nervous because it's not clear what might happen if you need an abortion to save your life, like during ectopic pregnancies.

That's when a pregnancy starts growing in the wrong spot, mostly in the fallopian tubes. This happens in roughly one in 100 pregnancies, and in the fallopian tubes. This happens in roughly one in a hundred pregnancies, and it can be really dangerous. As you can imagine, as the pregnancy grows, the fallopian tubes can rupture, causing major internal bleeding. One study from Nigeria of more than 1,300 ruptured ectopic pregnancies found that 240 women nearly died and 13 women did.

To avoid all of this, medical guidelines from around the world say that doctors should end the pregnancy, which won't survive anyway. But whether this will be allowed throughout the US? It's now up to individual states to decide. Okay, our final question today is how does an abortion affect someone's life after they get one? Like, if you get an abortion, will you feel super depressed afterwards?

Because this idea has become so common that it's got its own name, post feel super depressed afterwards. Because this idea has become so common that it's got its own name, post-abortion syndrome. Which is why when you think of someone who had an abortion, you might think of stories like this. I went through depression after that. And the grief and the guilt began immediately. I honestly feel like it was the worst mistake I ever made in my life. So that is these women's personal experience. But how common is it? What's the chance you'll feel like that? Well, let me introduce you to a very interesting study on this very point.

It was started in 2008, and scientists followed several hundred women from 30 clinics around the US and they followed them for five years. The researcher who started this project is Diana Green Foster. She's a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco and her study is called the Turnnaway Study. So the Turnaway Study is the first study to look for American women of what the experience of having an abortion is compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. When you're at a dinner party, what do you tell people you research? Women's health. I'm so not interested in hearing random people's abortion stories. So everyone in Diana's study had wanted an abortion, but one group got them and the other didn't.

They were turned away because their pregnancies were too far along, so their provider wouldn't do an abortion. And so Diana and her team studied these two groups, those who got the abortion and those who had the babies. They followed them up, asking questions about their lives, studied these two groups, those who got the abortion and those who had the babies. They followed them up, asking questions about their lives, like why they had wanted the abortion, but also about... Depression, anxiety, a whole bunch of economic questions,

questions about the relationship with the man involved in the pregnancy, including questions about violence from intimate partners. And several years later, Diana tracked how their answers changed over time. And she found? No evidence of mental health harms that might emerge from having had an abortion. Well, actually, Diana's study found that in the short term, the women who couldn't get abortions had worse anxiety. But things did even out.

Over five years, the two groups had similar levels of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. And Diana's study isn't the only one to find this. A Finnish paper of more than 1,000 women under 18 who got pregnant also couldn't find any significant psychiatric differences between those who got abortions and those who didn't seven years later. As for the idea that many people regret their decisions and feel guilty about what they've done, well, Diana wrote that this was, quote, unfounded. What she did find was that after three years, the typical participant in her study had more than a 95% chance of reporting

that the abortion was right for her. And Diana says that feeling stuck. Over five years, women who get abortions remain relieved and feel like they made the right decision in having an abortion. So while this, of course, can be different for different people, the research tells us that over time, having an abortion doesn't seem to hurt your mental health. But Diana's team did find differences when it came to careers and financial security. The women who had given birth were...

Less likely to be employed full-time, more likely to receive public assistance, but also more likely to be in poverty. This difference only showed up after the women gave birth. The groups had been financially similar before. And that Finnish study that we mentioned before, it kind of found the same thing. So women who got abortions were more likely to be better off financially and better educated by the time

they were 25 compared to the women who gave birth. Diana also found that for the relatively small group of women who had wanted an abortion because they were in an abusive relationship with the father and then couldn't get one. Those women were more likely to still have contact with their abuser two and a half years later. And we find that violence from the man involved in the pregnancy declines precipitously for women who have the abortion, and that's because they have broken ties with that person.

Diana said that overall, the women who got abortions went into this decision with their eyes open. And women were right. They knew what to expect. Having an abortion is probably not fun at all, and they made the decision to do this stigmatized thing because they looked at their lives

and realized they weren't ready for a baby. When you look at pop culture, have you ever watched a movie or a television show about a woman who had an abortion and just thought, my study says the exact opposite thing happens? I'm so not a pop culture person that I couldn't even tell you when I last saw a movie that had abortion in it. It might have been Dirty Dancing. That's how old and out of touch I am. Bottom line, women who have an abortion aren't at a higher risk for depression or anxiety. But when people don't get the abortions that they want,

the research shows that they have less money, less education, and probably less job opportunities. But when you look at the science around abortion, the big thing that was missing in the Supreme Court's majority opinion was what happens when abortion is illegal. There's a bunch of studies on this, and they tend to find that as it gets harder to get a legal abortion, the number of abortions doesn't actually go down. They often just get riskier.

In the US, before abortion was legal, there were stories of women drinking bleach or turpentine, inserting needles and pens into their vaginas. Injuries were so common that in some hospitals, special wards were set up just for botched abortions. It's 2022 and we're not going back in time to a pre-Roe world. A lot of us have access to way more information. Back then, we didn't have the internet or VPNs.

You couldn't order abortion pills in the mail and have them shipped to your house. But still, from the research we have, this decision isn't likely to stop abortions. It'll probably just make them more dangerous. That's Science Versus. Hello? Hey, Meryl Horne, producer at Science Versus.

Hey, Wendy. How many citations in this week's episode? This week we have 149 citations. Oh, 149. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go? They can go to our show notes and then follow the links to the transcripts. And the only other thing to say is that we were on a break working on other episodes and then came back to drop this one. But now we are going back into hibernation. Yep. Working away.

We will see everyone back in September. Yep. See you in September. All right. Thanks, Meryl. Bye. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Heather Rogers, Meryl Horn, me, Wendy Zuckerman, Ben Kebrick, Caitlin Sori, Shruti Ravindran, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Rimler, and Michelle Dang. Edited by Annie Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and Aketi Foster-Keys. Extra help with production and editorial from Rachel Ward, Alex Bloomberg and Jorge Just. Music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord, Catherine Anderson and Emma Munger.

Thanks to Dr Lola Pellegrino, Ronnie Shanker, Dr Diane Horvath-Cosper, Rachel Jones, Elizabeth Nash, Dr Yoon-Jin Kim, Delma Limones, and Gilda Sedge. Also, a big thanks to Katie Bishop and Reverend David Gushy. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.