Introduction

In the United States, the fight to keep abortion legal is still very much alive, as it has been for decades (Planned Parenthood, 2021). The Supreme Court, which holds a 6-3 conservative majority, is currently considering the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law banning all abortions over the gestational age of 15 weeks except in medical emergencies and in the case of severe fetal abnormality (Supreme Court of the United States, 2022; Mississippi Legislature, 2018). The state of Mississippi is asking the Court to overturn the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade from 1973, which set the precedent of making access to safe abortions a legal right. Specifically, it was declared that state criminal abortion laws violate the “Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy” (Planned Parenthood, 2022; Justia US Supreme Court Center).

Reading up on the ongoing abortion fight sparked my curiosity about the number of abortions that have been carried out in the United States over many years. I specifically wanted to take a look at whether there’s been a significant increase or decrease in abortions in more recent years.

Inspiration

One data visualization that inspired me was this one from The Economist:

While interesting and thought-provoking, I found this visualization to be a little complicated in having to examine both the abortion rate on the left and the birth rate on the right while trying to comprehend the two different graphical lines in relation to one another. As a result, I wanted to create a few visualizations that were much simpler and easier to understand.

Materials

I created my visualizations through Tableau Public, a free software with which users can create interactive graphs, maps, and live dashboards using a variety of formats, including CSV, Excel, and Google Sheets. For my dataset, I used the Center for Open Science’s Global Abortion Incidence Dataset CSV, which includes national abortion data from 1990 to 2018 (OSF, 2021).

Methods

Initially, I considered zooming out and comparing the abortion numbers of the G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US as these are considered the world’s largest and most advanced economies (BBC, 2021). I hypothesized that their graphical lines might be somewhat similarly shaped, insinuating a generally more accepting attitude over time of women’s right to access abortion care if needed.

Out of those seven nations, because I noticed that the US had such noticeably steep declines in addition to my being familiar with the nuances of America’s abortion situation, I decided to focus just on the US.

Results

For my first visualization on top, I made a simple line graph of the number of abortions in the US starting at the end of the year for 1990 and stopping at 2017’s year end. (I did not include 2018 as the dataset didn’t contain information for that last year for the US.) After initially creating this visualization, I noticed a very steep decline that occurred recently from 2014 to 2015. By contrast, from the years 2009 to 2014, and then from 2015 to 2017, the decline was much flatter and more gradual.

Therefore, I added a text box, declaring, “The most recent steep decrease occurred from 2014 to 2015,” with the points on those corresponding years labeled with the number of abortions in order to bring this information immediately to the viewer’s attention. The initial color that had been automatically assigned to the US when I first looked at the G7 nations was orange. But once I created my second visualization and knew that I wanted to use an orange-red color palette for the abortion numbers, I changed the US’ color to blue as to avoid an assumption by the viewer that the color of the top chart was related to the colors in the second chart.

For my second visualization, I wanted to show the actual percentage change for each year compared to the previous year from 1990 to 2017. Again, I wanted to hone in on the large decrease from 2014 to 2015, which turned out to be 43.03%, which I labeled for 2015. Then, I added the text box that says, “The steep 2014-2015 decline was the most recent significant percentage decrease” to bring attention to this fact. I also wanted to add a color scale that corresponded to the actual number of abortions for which I chose an orange-to-red sequential color scale, with red insinuating higher numbers.

Reflection

Limitations

Currently, one limitation consists of being a new user to Tableau Public, and, therefore, only time and experimentation will allow me to better understand the software’s capabilities and nuances. Another limitation is having ample time to find and clean data as I hunt for datasets of particular interest and/or collect data firsthand.

Working with Tableau Public

In terms of using Tableau Public, my thoughts are that overall it’s a helpful tool for investigating data and creating visualizations, especially for those who are unfamiliar with or new to computer programming. However, just like any other software, it has its quirks. Their server seems to have issues regularly, and, therefore, I would advise anyone using Tableau to publish their work as soon as they begin and to re-publish regularly or the most recent edits may be lost.

Future Directions

After creating my visualizations, I searched the internet for “decline abortion US 2014 2015,” and discovered investigative pieces confirming this data trend by such organizations as the CDC and the pro-choice research organization Guttmacher Institute.

However, in the CDC piece, the researcher points out that while abortion numbers may have declined as a whole from 2014 to 2015, for the specific subset of women aged 25-29 years old, the number of abortions actually increased during that time (Jatlaoui et al, 2018).

Also, in the Guttmacher piece, it states that the organization’s census identified that while in 2015 there was a 2% increase of abortion-providing facilities from the year before, that “longstanding regional and state disparities in abortion access grew even more pronounced” (Guttmacher Institute, 2019). It points out that while the number of clinics increased by 16% in the Northeast and by 4% in the West, they actually decreased by 6% in the Midwest and by 9% in the South. In 2017, 89% of U.S. counties did not have a clinic that provided abortion services, and 38% of women of reproductive age lived in these counties.

Based on these two reports, I would be interested in taking a look at different age groups as well as the racial breakdowns within different regions of the country as well as by state over many years.

References

BBC. (2021, June 11). G7 summit: What is it and why is it in Cornwall? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49434667

Goldberg, B. (2018, November 21). CDC says U.S. abortion rate plunged in decade ending 2015. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-abortion-study/cdc-says-u-s-abortion-rate-plunged-in-decade-ending-2015-idUSKCN1NQ2AZ

Guttmacher Institute. (2019, September 18). U.S. Abortion Rate Continues to Decline, Reaching Historic Low in 2017. News Release. https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2019/us-abortion-rate-continues-decline-reaching-historic-low-2017

Jatlaoui, T.C., Boutot, M.E., Mandel, M.G., Whiteman, M.K., Ti, A., Petersen, E., Pazol, K. (2018, November 23). Abortion Surveillance – United States, 2015. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Surveillance Summaries, 67 (13), 1-45. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss6713a1

Justia US Supreme Court Center. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/

Mississippi Legislature. (2018). House Bill 1510. http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2018/html/HB/1500-1599/HB1510IN.htm

OSF (2021). Global Abortion Incidence Dataset. https://osf.io/6t4eh/

Planned Parenthood. (2021). Historical Abortion Law Timeline: 1850 to Today. https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/abortion-central-history-reproductive-health-care-america/historical-abortion-law-timeline-1850-today

Planned Parenthood. (2022). Roe v. Wade at Risk: Nationwide Legal Abortion May Be a Thing of the Past. https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-v-wade

Supreme Court of the United States. (2022). No. 19-1392: Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al., Petitioners v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/19-1392.html