And these barriers have only gotten more complicated since the US Supreme Court gave states the power to ban abortion in 2022’s Dobbs ruling. To ill

The United States of Abortion Mazes

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2024-10-21 19:30:05

And these barriers have only gotten more complicated since the US Supreme Court gave states the power to ban abortion in 2022’s Dobbs ruling.

To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies.

The six personal stories included in this piece from “Ava”, “Billie”, “Courtney”, “Nicki”, “Margot”, and “Simone” were sourced from actual news reports, including reporting by CNN, The Indianapolis Star, Michigan Public Radio, Propublica, The New York Times, The 19th, The Tennessean, Texas Public Radio, and The Washington Post. Sometimes details were combined from multiple true stories to create a full narrative. Names, ages, and states were altered to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals. The illustrations for these stories were done by Maria Scherlies.

To calculate the complexity of each state maze, 28 state-level data points from the Guttmacher Institute were collected, normalized, weighted, and combined to produce a complexity score. Abortion bans were weighted at 10, with ban exceptions and constitutional measures weighted at 5. Other policies and laws aimed at limiting abortion access were weighted at 2. Other reproductive health policies, like sexual education and contraception access, were weighted at 1.