What Happens When We Deny People Abortions?

Diana Greene Foster moves reproductive autonomy out of an abstract argument about moral positions and into a concrete question: what can change over the years after someone who has decided to end a pregnancy is turned away by an institution? Her talk draws on the Turnaway Study, a longitudinal research project she helped lead. It is not personal medical advice; it is a demographer’s account of what research can show about the consequences of being denied wanted care.

Researchers recruited nearly 1,000 abortion seekers at 30 facilities in the United States and followed them for five years, comparing people who received abortions with those turned away because they were just beyond a facility’s gestational limit. This design made it possible to study how access to wanted care relates to health, work and household economic outcomes. It was not a randomized trial, and its participants do not represent every pregnant person or every health system. The evidence is valuable precisely when its longitudinal strength and its boundaries are read together. The American Economic Association’s review summarizes the design and findings; UCSF’s account of the health follow-up describes reported differences over time.

The talk’s feminist turn is to refuse the idea that “choice” is simply an individual will detached from material conditions. Pregnancy and birth involve bodies, time, income and care; when law or service systems narrow someone’s options, the costs do not disappear. They are transferred to that person and their family. Reproductive autonomy therefore concerns more than whether a procedure is formally legal. It also concerns whether people can shape the terms on which they live, work, care for others and imagine a future.

The study should not be turned into a formula that predicts what will happen to every individual. Laws, access to health care, income, racialized treatment and support for caregiving differ across places and people; no average erases that variation. Foster’s talk matters because it brings policy debate back to a real timeline of lives while asking a difficult question: who has the authority to decide which futures can be pursued? Its evidence informs that question without replacing the knowledge and choices of the people whose lives are at stake.

Talk and further reading: Official TED talk; review of Turnaway Study findings. To place these empirical findings within a broader reproductive-justice framework, see Loretta J. Ross on intersectional feminist activism.