Polling conducted in August by All In Together, in partnership with polling firm Echelon Insights found that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.

For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women say they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.

Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.

In the wake of Dobbs, stories of women enduring horrific medical trauma in states where abortion is illegal have been widely reported. For instance, Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, documented her 19-day long harrowing miscarriage on TikTok – including her three trips to the emergency room. While only six weeks pregnant, she was denied access to a D&C (dilation and curettage) surgery because of Idaho’s abortion ban.

It goes almost without saying that this is not good news for the already declining birthrates in the U.S. According to research from Pew, birthrates in the U.S. had been falling since the early 2000s and plummeted during the Covid pandemic. Fertility rates briefly rebounded after the pandemic but now, post-Dobbs, they have dropped again.

  • bioemerl@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Seems flawed at first glance since it doesn’t look at pre and post roe answers. Birth rates have been on the fall for ages.

    • Chetzemoka@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “Women are specifically stating that the direct reason they’re choosing to delay pregnancy is the fall of Roe creating emergency health concerns.”

      “I dunno, are you sure you can believe what women say? Did you check the “real” data?”

      • bioemerl@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I do not believe what people say, no, because people are very often full of shit and data should almost always rely on cause and effect, not opinion polls.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          What people say is the basis for doing further research. It’s how we find out cause and effect in the first place!

            • bustrpoindextr@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              To what end? Should we not publish studies that require additional research? If we don’t publish those how will others in the field know to investigate certain areas?

              I mean, if you honestly don’t want things published until we know all the facts, then science and research will honestly grind to a halt.

              That’s how this shit works … Small, iterative steps. It’s slow, it’s not sexy, but it’s worked for thousands of years.

    • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Of course it corrects for the trend. It lowered birth rates because pregnancy is riskier since terminating is no longer an option unless you basically sit through a death panel to determine whether or not it’s clear enough that your life is at risk to terminate. Even then, by the time you get to the point where it’s clearly a risk to your life, it can produce sterilizing or permanently disabling consequences.

      All for the privilege of bringing a human being into the world with no public assistance, who has exorbitant medical costs, childcare costs, education costs, and for whom being unable to provide for them has catastrophic social consequences.

      • bioemerl@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It lowered birth rates because

        Unless you do a study of before and after data, you have no reasonable basis to make this claim.

        Is it likely that roe has an effect in this way? Yes.

        Does this “study” show that? No.

        Like, the article literally cites evidence against you. Claiming their questions were answered similarity in areas where abortion is legal and there are no extra risks.

        From a data perspective, this is trash data that should be ignored.

        • girlfreddy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          You wouldn’t agree with any data unless it backed your confirmation bias tho. That’s the problem here.

          • bioemerl@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Says someone happily pushing clearly flawed arguments because they agree with their opinion.

            • girlfreddy@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              You’ve disagreed with everything said without offering data to back your opinion.

              That’s how I know you’re disingenuous.

              • bioemerl@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                without offering data to back your opinion.

                You want data about how making conclusions about how things were changed by an event without showing what the data was like before the event is flawed?

        • bustrpoindextr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Claiming their questions were answered similarity in areas where abortion is legal and there are no extra risks.

          It’s almost like there’s been a trend across states to limit access to this due to the federal court case. And pregnancy could last longer than the individuals remaining access to this procedure.