Abortion in America, Part II: Diana Greene Foster on "The Turnaway Study"

Current Affairs

Politics, Culture, Government, Comedy, News

4.6 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

In this, the second part of our look into the realities of abortion in the contemporary United States, Nathan talks to Prof. Diana Greene Foster, Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) collaborative research group at UC-San Francisco. Prof. Foster is the author of the new book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having―or Being Denied―an Abortion. The book is based on a remarkable study that followed a thousand women over a decade, some of whom had abortions and some of whom were denied abortions. The study compared life outcomes for the two groups and found that not only does having an abortion not cause lasting regret or harm, but not having a desired abortion creates a host of negative life outcomes. We also discuss: - How those who are denied abortions accurately predict the negative life consequences they will face from the denial - Why access to contraception is still a long way from being universal - How the need to quickly gather enough money to pay for a procedure can mean the difference between having an abortion and not having one - Why, regardless of debates over the moral status of the fetus, we need to acknowledge that allowing people choice objectively makes them better off

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. And my guest today is Diana Green Foster. Professor Foster is the
0:24.0	Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health Collaborative
0:29.0	Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco. She's also the author of the book,
0:34.4	The Turnaway Study, 10 years, 1,000 Women, and the consequences of having
0:38.6	or being denied an abortion.
0:40.9	It's a remarkable book, a remarkable piece of research that adds information to the abortion
0:47.1	debate by looking at the lives of people who were either given abortions or denied abortions and following, as the
0:56.9	subtitle says, thousand women over a long period of time. The New Yorker calls it a remarkable
1:02.8	piece of research. And Gloria Steinem said that if you only read one book about democracy,
1:09.5	the turnaway study should be it.
1:11.7	It's available now from Scribner.
1:14.0	Diana Greenfoster, thank you so much for joining me.
1:16.7	Thank you so much for having me.
1:19.6	Okay, so I want to start with the research question that you were aiming to address here.
1:30.2	It seems like a lot of the abortion conversation, the debate centers on philosophy about
1:38.5	the moral status of the fetus.
1:41.7	And you, as I understand it, thought there was a sort of big missing piece of information
1:48.3	that was necessary to having a sensible discussion about what abortion actually means.
1:56.7	So maybe you could lay out where you started, what you thought we sort of needed to understand
2:02.0	before you began conducting this giant research project.
2:07.2	Yeah. So the turnaway study was started with the hope of answering the question, does abortion
2:12.9	hurt women? Because this idea that abortion might harm women has been used to restrict access to abortion.
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