Would Banning Abortion Increase Poverty? (felony, Colorado, representation, household)
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Poor women get extra public assistance benefits for each child they have, so it's actually a financial plus for them.
Indeed! A huge financial plus. In Texas the family who has a second child gets an additional $43, but hang in there and have a third baby and you get a whopping $63! https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/f...tanf-cash-help
They don't appear to be all that interested. At poverty level, only 8.6% of the women with unintended pregnancies get an abortion. 91.4% have their babies.
I'd like to point out some issues with the observational study you're citing...
The total sample size of the Brookings study is 3885 divided into 5 income cohorts, but the size of each cohort remains unspecified, meaning there could be 1200 women in the lowest income cohort and 12 in the highest. I think we can agree that if the sizes are unequal, it would have significant implications for anyone trying to draw conclusions from the research, no?
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that 777 unmarried women are in each cohort.
Here's how the real numbers work out...
For women making up to $11,490 per year (the poverty threshold at the time of the study), the pregnancy rate was 9%, which means 70 women became pregnant unintentionally and 8.6% or six of them aborted. Here are the particulars in real numbers...
Cohort 1...up to $11,490/yr...70 pregnancies...6 abortions
Cohort 2...up to $22,980/yr...40 pregnancies...3 abortions
Cohort 3...up to $34,470/yr...45 pregnancies...7 abortions
Cohort 4...up to $45,970/yr...34 pregnancies...3 abortions
In cohort five, we have absolutely no idea about the income distribution. The women in this cohort could be making $46k or $460k per year. Who knows? I hope we can agree, though, that $46k/yr is not an income on which a single woman could comfortably raise a child.
In any case, what is apparent from this observational study, and the point I think the authors at Brookings were actually trying to make, is that as income levels rise, single women are much more likely to use birth control effectively and have better access to abortion if they decide to have one.
But you yourself said that medicaid doesn't pay for abortions, how is a woman who lives at the poverty level supposed to pay for an abortion?
They can't, and don't, quite obviously.
Like I said, 91.4% of women in poverty who self report having unintended pregnancies go on to have their babies. What the pro-abortion contingent has been claiming, that abortion is necessary for poor women to control the size of their families, is completely false. Abortion is a higher-income woman's privilege as abortion is NOT free OR cheap.
This statistic makes a lot of sense as abortions cannot be paid for by using federal programs such as Medicaid. Higher-income women are much more likely to be able to afford the cost and consequently have a MUCH higher abortion rate.
This says that 49% of abortions are for women living below the poverty level, and another 26% are for women living at 1 to 2x the poverty level.
It's no secret that the low-income outnumber those in the highest income group. It's called the top 1%, 5%, 10%... for a reason. They're relatively rare.
What you need to look at is the RATE of abortion for each income group.
For women in poverty, 91.4% of those who have an unintended pregnancy go on to have their babies.
For women in the highest income level, that drops down to 68.1%.
There's a significant statistical difference between the two.
Indeed! A huge financial plus. In Texas the family who has a second child gets an additional $43, but hang in there and have a third baby and you get a whopping $63! https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/f...tanf-cash-help
Oh, please... TANF is NOT the only public assistance benefit they receive.
It's no secret that the low-income outnumber those in the highest income group. It's called the top 1%, 5%, 10%... for a reason. They're relatively rare.
What you need to look at is the RATE of abortion for each income group.
For women in poverty, 91.4% of those who have an unintended pregnancy go on to have their babies.
For women in the highest income level, that drops down to 68.1%.
There's a significant statistical difference between the two.
It doesn't matter what income group people who have abortions are in, or the proportion in each. I have yet to find any analysis, study or other finding that would show that outlawing abortion would decrease poverty. An unplanned pregnancy is far more likely to decrease a woman's socioeconomic status than increase it. So if she starts out at 500% of poverty level perhaps she ends up at 400%. And to the subject of the thread, women who were at 125% may end up at 85%, below poverty. And an unplanned pregnancy of a woman living in poverty who keeps her baby means another person in poverty.
One very clear indication of this is the effect of an unplanned pregnancy on teenagers and the impact on the likelihood they will graduate high school. From the CDC: "Pregnancy and birth are significant contributors to high school dropout rates among girls. Only about 50% of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by 22 years of age, whereas approximately 90% of women who do not give birth during adolescence graduate from high school." https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm. People who fail to finish high school have less earning potential than those that do.
It is perfectly OK to argue a moral point about abortion being wrong for those that believe it while still acknowledging that it is very difficult to argue prohibiting abortions will likely increase the number of people living in poverty.
It's no secret that the low-income outnumber those in the highest income group. It's called the top 1%, 5%, 10%... for a reason. They're relatively rare.
What you need to look at is the RATE of abortion for each income group.
For women in poverty, 91.4% of those who have an unintended pregnancy go on to have their babies.
For women in the highest income level, that drops down to 68.1%.
There's a significant statistical difference between the two.
That is one set of statistics that can be used, if you're trying to falsely claim that most abortions are performed on wealthy women. 49% of abortions are for women below the poverty level, and another 26% are for women at 1 to 2 times the poverty level. BTW, the poverty level for a single woman is an astonishingly low $13,590.
So almost 2/3 of abortions are preventing additional people from being born into extreme poverty.
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