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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Tony Lewis.

On Monday, a Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked, causing shockwaves.

The opinion, if it's officially adopted, will overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that guarantees the right to an abortion.

Even though experts were expecting this outcome, the leaked opinion still came as something of a surprise.

The callousness of the decision is kind of shocking too.

The idea that the Constitution doesn't protect people's decision making around something so fundamental as childbearing when it has such huge impacts on their health and their ability to support themselves and their children.

That's Diana Green Foster, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

She led the turn away study, a longitudinal study of nearly 1,000 women seeking abortions, who either got them or returned away because they were just passed the gestational cutoff.

Contrary to what some anti-abortion activists say, getting an abortion did not harm women.

In fact, women who were unable to access abortions were the ones who saw negative impacts, the study found.

With the medical literature, we see greater complications from childbirth than from abortion, and in fact, two women died after giving birth.

But the impacts were not limited to health.

Being denied an abortion also had long-lasting negative effects on family's finances.

After one group gave birth, the people who received abortions and denied abortions there, you can see in their credit records, you can see in their public financial records,

that one group experienced greater bankruptcies, evictions, greater debt than the people who received their wanted abortion.

Not being able to access an abortion and being forced to carry a pregnancy to term resulted in worse outcomes for these women.

I should note that the turn away study specifically involved women, but of course not all people who get pregnant or seek abortions are women.

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