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So in my prior post, I observed that the conventional wisdom that \u201cthe only people who get abortions are those experiencing hardship, and that means poor women\u201d is not necessarily true.\u00a0 I pulled out some statistics from a study I had read which suggested that middle class women are just as likely to abort, but, after having published that post, I wanted to check the reliability of that study (which draws the conclusion, \u201cpoor women aren\u2019t having as many abortions as they should, so for equality reasons we should make the procedure more widely available and free!\u201d so there could have been a bias toward finding what they wanted to find.\u00a0 With that in mind, here\u2019s how the Brookings scholars did their math in \u201cSex, contraception, or abortion? Explaining class gaps in unintended childbearing<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n To begin with, their data source was the National Survey of Family Growth from 2011 \u2013 2013.\u00a0 This survey includes 10,416 men and women from ages 15 \u2013 44.\u00a0 For their study, they actually wanted to look specifically at women at risk of unintended pregnancy, so they narrowed this group down to \u201csingle women not trying to get pregnant,\u201d a group of 3,885 women in total.\u00a0 It\u2019s reasonable enough to exclude women who describe themselves as actively trying to get pregnant, and they rationalize the exclusion of married women because they may be \u201cless cautious about contraception\u201d and \u201cmore likely to continue with an unintended pregnancy\u201d and because \u201cmarriage is also correlated with income.\u201d<\/p>\n They then divide the women into multiple groups by income level.\u00a0 They don\u2019t explicitly state whether this is household income or individual income and, looking at the questionnaire,<\/a> I can\u2019t actually find the applicable question.\u00a0 Of course, for a single woman on her own it doesn\u2019t matter, and maybe, in any case, survey-takers don\u2019t count as \u201chousehold income\u201d that of an unmarried cohabitating partner, but you\u2019d think it would make a difference for teens and young adults who are still dependents.<\/p>\n They assess whether there is a difference in frequency of sexual activity by income group, and conclude the answer is \u201cno\u201d (though, as I griped in my original 2015 blog post, they use as the marker having had sex at least once in the past year when, of course, more frequent sex is duh connected up with more chances for pregnancy; they use this statistic because, so far as I can tell, this is all the survey asks, or, rather, it asks about number of partners but that doesn\u2019t really get at frequency with a given partner.<\/p>\n They then identify that, in this subgroup, poor women are considerably less likely to say that they had used a method of contraception \u2014 15.9% of poverty-level women and 14.6% of near-poor (100 \u2013 200% of poverty level) said they had used \u201cno method\u201d of contraception in the past year; all other income groups were at less than 10%.\u00a0 This appears to me to be a strangely-high number, because \u201csome method of contraception at some point in the past year\u201d seems a pretty low bar to clear, but, again, since the survey group includes anyone who reported having sex even a single time at any point in the past year, maybe not.<\/p>\n Then then calculate the pregnancy rates for this group.\u00a0 Again, this is not a rate for all women of childbearing age, but for all single women who report not actively seeking to get pregnant, and is in response to the question of whether they were pregnant at any point in the past year.<\/p>\n And, finally, of the women who said they were pregnant, they calculate the proportion of them for whom the pregnancy ended in abortion.\u00a0 My chart from the prior post backed out of this division with multiplication.<\/p>\n But there is another study which is cited much more often, using Guttmacher data, which comes up with a much higher prevalence of abortion among poor women.<\/p>\n The most recent set of calculations were published in the American Journal of Public Health<\/a> in 2017 (also available at the NIH website<\/a>) but use 2014 data (which is a bit later than the NSFG from 2011 \u2013 2013 and maybe<\/em> there\u2019s a bit of a difference due to changes in just these few years, as the abortion rate has been decreasing, but I don\u2019t know that this helps understand things).<\/p>\n This study used data from three sources: \u00a0 the Guttmacher Institute\u2019s 2014 Abortion Patient Survey (APS), the American Community Survey (ACS), and the NSFG. The APS is based on surveys of abortion clinics, who were themselves asked to survey women getting abortions, by asking women to privately fill out questionnaires.\u00a0 These questions asked about demographic characteristics, union status, and \u201cpoverty\u201d (it doesn\u2019t say income level, but the numbers don\u2019t make sense unless they also asked about income level and family size more generally so as to be able to classify people in income buckets).\u00a0 Because the study also needed to know the prevalence of women in each category, they used the ACS and the NSFG for these overall characteristics.<\/p>\n The results for this study are rather different \u2014 I\u2019ve added them to the prior table (the third rate is the rate for all women with incomes over 200% FPL).<\/p>\n Also, the total abortion rate for all women of childbearing years was 1.46%.<\/p>\n So why on earth are these two statistics so different?<\/p>\n The statistical breakdowns in the AJPH data explain the motivation the Brookings scholars had in excluding married women, as it is this group which had the lowest abortion prevalence:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2019\/05\/abortion-rate.png\")
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