The Politics of Reproduction Presents Professor Caitlin Myers, Middlebury College: "Who Gets Trapped in Post Roe America?"

Within hours of the end of Roe, state abortion bans began to take effect and clinics began to close, leaving would-be patients with little time to lose scrambling to figure out where to go next in a shifting and unstable landscape. As stunning as this moment may be, it’s neither unprecedented nor unpredictable. We’ve seen changes in abortion access before, and quantitative social scientists have spent decades using data and statistics to study these “natural experiments”—situations where sudden localized change in access affords us an opportunity to isolate and measure causal effects. I will discuss this literature and draw on it to provide a forecast of how many people seeking abortions are likely to find themselves trapped by distance and poverty, and what happens to them next.

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Global Studies, Arts & Sciences