Here & Now

Abortion Access and Maternal Health Disparities

Zac Schultz:

A month ago, news leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade ending the constitutional protection of a woman’s right to abortion. That final decision is expected to be released sometime this month and abortion advocates and experts are preparing for a post Roe landscape. Joining us now is Tiffany Green, assistant professor at UW-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences. Thanks for joining us.

Tiffany Green:

Thank you for having me.

Zac Schultz:

We don’t typically get this kind of advance notice on such a monumental ruling from the court. How have supporters and researchers been using the last month?

Tiffany Green:

I think it’s important to ground this conversation in the idea that many of us who research this topic and/or those who are abortion advocates and reproductive justice supporters knew this day was coming quite a long time ago. Particularly when we saw the composition of the court change and the fact that there are people in the United States that have been living in a post Roe world for a very long time. States have been chipping away at abortion access, including trap laws which impose different kinds of standards on providers or abortions that would be provided for those with a similar medical procedure. We have mandatory waiting periods which impose 24, 48 and sometimes 72 hour waiting periods for abortion, making people go for more than one visit. All those things have eroded access to abortion, in addition to many clinics closing. So what I would say is that although the fall of Roe will certainly be devastating, many people in the United States have been living in a post Roe world for a very long time.

Zac Schultz:

And because of that truth, you have been able to do research that determines who’s impacted when a clinic closes. If Wisconsins clinics are forced to close because we go back to the 1849 law on the books that would eliminate virtually all abortion in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois would still have clinics but what does that mean for people who would need to travel even further to obtain that healthcare?

Tiffany Green:

Sure. There have been a number of scholars including those at Wisconsin, former graduate student Joanna Venator and Professor Jason Fletcher have done work in this area showing that distance is a key indicator of people’s access the abortion. It makes it harder to get abortions. So what will people do? I think, one, people in the north of our state always have had a challenge getting abortions because most of the clinics where that is available are in our neck of the woods in Madison and Milwaukee. That’s always been a problem. I think some people will obviously go to Illinois where the laws are very different governing access to abortion. For people that are unable to cross the border or people that are unable to get to other states, I think it is going to be a real challenge to get an abortion given that we also have a number of systems that provide healthcare for people with the capacity to get pregnant. They’re Catholic and they don’t provide that vital service. So I think it is a problem now and it’s going to continue to be a challenge after the fall of Roe.

Zac Schultz:

We use the broad term of woman but there is a lot of subgroups within that category: economic, racial, all other categories. Who is affected the most?

Tiffany Green:

I want to be clear that those of us in this space recognize not just cis women get pregnant, transmen and nonbinary folks get pregnant and they have even harder access getting to these services given the way our healthcare system is structured. So I want to say that. But essentially people that have resources are going to likely be able to get abortions. That’s not to say they never have challenges but the people that are going to be most affected are those that are poor, those that are essential workers, those that have tough work schedules that are not able to get out of it. Those who don’t have resources. You know, and they are – because of the way our society is structured – those people are going to be disproportionately Black and brown and indigenous and we’re going to see those disparities exacerbated.

Zac Schultz:

There have been studies that examine what that does to a woman’s ability to participate in the workforce or to get further education and escape poverty. Is that lost in the typical debate about abortion that we hear at, maybe, the congressional level?

Tiffany Green:

Sure, I think what we get caught up in is trying to parse people’s reasons for having abortions. I think as a researcher, I can kind of step back and say okay, regardless of how you feel about abortion on a moral level, we have very clear evidence that limiting access to abortion impacts pregnant people’s health and well-being and their economic outcomes. This is just a fact, right? That’s — we can debate about the morality of abortion, but the effects of abortion or limiting access have been very well established and as we said, they can lead to adverse financial outcomes. They can lead to poor pregnancy-related outcomes. Those outcomes are exacerbated among Black and/or indigenous people so there have been studies that show that laws that limit access to abortion can increase levels of pre-term births, death from congenital abnormalities among Black infants of Black women. So this isn’t — that’s not debatable. The science is always evolving and growing but the fact that we have a very robust body of evidence that shows there are negative implications to restricting abortion is not really debatable.

Zac Schultz:

Tiffany Green, thank you very much for your time today.

Tiffany Green:

You’re very welcome.

Zac Schultz:

Governor Tony Evers is calling the legislature in for a special session later this month for the purpose of repealing the 1849 Wisconsin law criminalizing abortion. Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu already stated the chamber will gavel out of that session without action on the bill.