1) Quotes from Caitlin Myers
“In economics, a lot of folks who believe that we're all rational and not credit constrained would argue that, look, if carrying an unwanted pregnancy to turn is something that's going to have enormous financial and life consequences for somebody, then it doesn't matter how far away the nearest abortion facility is or the nearest state where abortion is legal. They're going to find a way. Everybody's going to find a way. But that is a standard, traditional economist way of thinking. And it's one that really neglects the actual reality of people's lives and particularly the lives of people who are seeking abortions.
So every year, about a million people in the United States obtain an abortion. And if you look at the characteristics of people who obtain abortions, they are, first of all, 98% are legal adults. So most of them aren't minors. The majority of them are already parenting. And 75% of them are low income. More than half of them are actually below the poverty line. More than half are reporting disruptive life events. "
“ Based on limited data, we have something like 80% to 90% of them have subprime credit scores, which means they're credit constrained. So we're talking about a very vulnerable population that might not be able to figure out how to travel even 50 miles, much less 500 miles, to obtain abortion services.” - Caitlin Myers
“I published a lot of data on the open science framework and then also an abortion access dashboard.org, which is what we're looking at right here. This is a joint project with three amazing geographers and Esri. This is obviously a map of the contiguous United States and every little blue dot on this map is an abortion facility, brick-and-mortar facility that was operating in March of 2022 before the Dobbs decision came…We look at all the census tracts which are like little bitty spatial units. And we calculate the driving distance from the center of the tract to the nearest facility…We added the population of women aged 15 to 44 who live there. And then we divide. By the number of facilities in the destination to get a metric on average, how many people is this facility responsible for serving? Big dots mean the facilities are serving a lot of people. But you can't tell that right now because it's March of 2022 and all the dots are the same size… So less than 1% of the US population is more than 200 miles from the nearest abortion facility at this time, the average person of reproductive age in the United States is about 25 miles from the nearest abortion facility. Then, as we all know, Dobbs happens. The decision is released in June of 2022. And trigger bans start to take effect…So here's how the landscape changes…
I want you to notice two things. First of all, the states that are outlined in dark borders are the states that are enforcing a near total abortion ban. Second of all, you can see that some of the regions have gotten very dark pink. Those are the places that are the farthest from abortion facilities. Second of all, you can see that some of the dots that weren't really noticeable before like this is Wichita, KS. You probably weren't paying all that much attention to Wichita. ”
“All of a sudden, Wichita's dot blows up. Wichita becomes a destination for millions of people traveling out. It's the nearest destination for millions of people traveling out of Texas, Oklahoma, parts of Louisiana, parts of Arkansas. ” - Caitlin Myers
“About six months after we published it, I got a random phone call from a clinician in Ohio, who had funding and support to establish an abortion facility somewhere that would be accessible to people coming out of banned states. She said, ‘okay, so I found your dashboard and Wichita. I think Wichita is the place right?’. I was like, ‘I'm a scientist, I just measure things. I don't try to change.’ It's like I don't know, I'm getting really uncomfortable. She's like, ‘but it's Wichita right? They don't have the equipment available, their dots are really big.” And I realized that she had really been looking at it, thinking about it. And they moved to Wichita and established a health center. There and a couple of pictures of my map on their about my page, and my students were very happy.”
2) Quotes from Caitlyn Ralph
“The connection I was making — which was not a new story, even at this time — was that TRAP laws are closing clinics. Less clinics means more driving time for people to actually access abortion. But the piece of the story that I felt like wasn't being told, again back in early 2017, from a data perspective, was how the duration of the pregnancy further funneled down what clinics would be available to a certain person. The challenge was, at this time in 2017...this data really wasn't publicly available. So...we often have to create our own datasets in these scenarios.”
“There was a project called the Safe Place Project that actually did have a map of clinics in the country. So we used that as a base, and then from there — very similar to what you were describing with some of your students — I had to go on my own, go to every website, and try to call the clinics. I tried to keep the phone calls as short as possible because I did not want to use their resources, but I needed to understand what services they offered at the actual clinic.”
“So then we created a more detailed dataset. We broke down the timing into basically four different categories: eight weeks, twelve weeks, which is obviously the first trimester, and then sixteen and twenty weeks. Then we did a very similar mathematical analysis to calculate the driving times, basically equidistant to these clinics.” - Caitlyn Ralph
“This is a regularly updating dashboard that includes state level abortion counts. It looks at interstate travel for abortions, and then also changes over time in travel for abortion care.”
“Instead of just throwing the reader in the actual map to play around with all the different mazes, what Jan decided to do was basically collating six individual abortion stories that were representative of the states that they were living in, and the maze of the state that they were living in. She did this by putting together a bunch of news reports, removing identifying characteristics.”
3) Quotes from Johana Bhuiyan
“If you literally don't take away anything else, just know that Google will know that you're pregnant before your mom does” - Johana Bhuiyan
“ I was really focused on looking at the ways that the data that Google and Meta and all these other big tech companies collect and store and share or could harm people seeking productive care. I was newly pregnant two years ago, and before I had the opportunity to tell my mother that I was pregnant, I was getting posts pushed to me on Instagram that's like ‘buy all of these things for your unborn child who's like six weeks in your belly.’ I had ads following me across the internet… if you are putting yourself in the shoes of a person who might not want to keep that pregnancy or in a state where access to abortion or reproductive health care is limited or effectively banned, then it becomes really, really scary that these companies so quickly are able to glean that information about you just from a couple of, you know, I honestly wasn't doing it that much.”
“ There is a Google transparency report and they're very public.”
“The first half of last year Google got 61,000 law enforcement requests, and Meta got 82,000 law enforcement requests, and you will see in the vast majority of those cases they hand over data.” - Johana Bhuiyan
“There's a lot of reasons for that, and one of that is, these are legal processes. If Google and Meta get a subpoena or a search warrant, there are not a ton of legal avenues for them to push back. The other reason why is they're not super incentivized to push back. Meta and Google, as we've seen, they don't want to tussle with the government on a daily basis, and this is a lot of law enforcement and pressure to push back against. They're using existing tools like search warrants and subpoenas, but they're also coming up with new and fun tools to access that data, because that data is so juicy.
Police are not asking for healthcare data. They're asking for your messages. They're asking for your location information. They're asking for any number of things. And healthcare data on its own protecting that does really not sufficiently protect other people seeking abortions, or all of the other people that these systems have already… There's a case in Nebraska where the mother, daughter duo work charged with seeking abortion. For that was their Facebook messenger.”
“Companies that are tracking you when you're doing things that you like, they should. Why do these third party companies that you're doing it and I want to plug this tool that I use to see what like trackers are on each website that I use. It's from the. It's an unbelievable publication. It's called black light. It's really great. You can do it. You can like, as you're searching for something sensitive, throw that link in black light and see how horrifying it is. How many trackers are on there. So I have already published a couple of stories on this. The ones that I published specifically looked at Googles promises, which was that they were going to. Leads location data for sensitive places which included. Reproductive health clinics, the long and short of it, is that it's really hard to disentangle a single data point from this, like larger web of data that they collect on you.”
Links to Websites Mentioned:
Abortion Access Dashboard