20 United States The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
21W
hileleroycarhart, a doctorwho
specialises in late-term abortions,
wasfinishinghismostrecenttermination,
the manager of his clinic in Bethesda,
Maryland,outlinedtheprocedure.Abor-
tionsinthesecondhalfofpregnancytake
betweentwoandfourdays,saidChristine
Spiegoski,anursewearingat-shirtthat
read:“Don’tlikeabortion? Preventpreg-
nancybyf**kingyourself!”First,thedoc-
torinjectspotassiumchlorideordigoxin
intothefetus’sheart,killingit withinmin-
utes. If he is unable to reach the heart and
instead pumps the drug into the amniotic
sac, death can take up to 24 hours. Dr Car-
hart euthanises the fetus at the beginning
of the procedure because its tissue and
skull then soften and contract, easing re-
moval. At 25 weeks a fetus weighs around a
pound and a half and is over a foot long;
some of those Dr Carhart aborts are older.
Over the next two or three days, medical
staff at the clinic, one of only three in
America to provide third-trimester abor-
tions, insert small sticks into the woman’s
cervix to stretch it open. Then the woman
is induced and the fetus delivered. The
goal, says Ms Spiegoski, is a delivery “as
much like regular labour as possible”. The
procedure she describes is quite different
from President Donald Trump’s oft-repeat-edclaimthatlate-termabortionsinvolve
babiesbeing“rippedfromtheirmother’s
womb”.Butit isnotdifficulttounderstand
whymanypeople,includingthosebroadly
infavourofabortionchoice,findit proble-
matic. This is also why Mr Trump has
seizeduponlate-termabortion,themost
controversialdimensionofanissuethat
hasinflamedAmericanpoliticsforalmost
halfa century,asa campaignissue.
Dataonabortionlateinpregnancyin
Americaarepatchy.Notallstatesarere-
quired to report abortion statistics to the
Centres for Disease Control (cdc), a federal
agency, and the 40 states that do provide
the gestational ages of aborted fetuses use
ranges that do not reveal how many termi-
nations take place in the third trimester.
Still, the data suggest late abortions are ex-
tremely rare. In 2015, 1.3% of abortions took
place after 21 weeks. But they carry huge po-
litical weight, as Mr Trump, who once de-
scribed himself as “very pro-choice” is
keenly aware.
The two sides in America’s abortion war
have driven each other to new extremes
this year. A flood of early-abortion laws in
conservative states, some tantamount to
total bans, have prompted other, socially
liberal, states to make it easier to have an
abortion at the other end of pregnancy.WASHINGTON,DC
Rarebutcontroversialthird-trimesterproceduresprovefertilegroundfor
campaigners,includingthepresidentLate-termabortionsAbortionwar
mained similarly destitute in the years
after. Taking advantage of the random as-
signment of judges—some of whom are
more lenient than others—also let the re-
searchers isolate the unique effect of evic-
tion on measures such as credit scores,
debt loads, use of payday lenders and
neighbourhood poverty levels.
As expected, the authors found negative
effects on people who had been evicted.
But these were not very large. Credit scores
declined somewhat. Yet debt out for collec-
tion, use of payday lenders and neighbour-
hood poverty levels appeared unchanged
regardless of whether residents had been
evicted or not. “The small causal impacts
mean that merely avoiding the eviction it-
self is unlikely to alleviate a lot of the finan-
cial distress that low-income tenants are
facing,” says Winnie van Dijk, an econo-
mist at the University of Chicago who is
also one of the study’s authors. The unfor-
tunate event of an eviction, in their view, is
better understood as a culminating indica-
tor of “long, multi-year financial strains”.
Another recent study by Robert Collin-
son and Davin Reed, two economists, ap-
plied a similar methodology to research on
evictions in New York. They found very
small negative effects on evicted residents’
employment and earnings. At the same
time, they did not see markedly higher use
of government benefits such as welfare or
food stamps. “Overall, these results suggest
that formal evictions may have a quantita-
tively small direct effect on poverty,” they
wrote. Still, an eviction seemed to increase
the chances of using both homeless shel-
ters and hospitals for mental-health treat-
ment. Uniquely among American cities,
New York maintains a “right to shelter” for
all homeless residents, including single
adults, which may explain some of the
findings. It is possible that evictions may
not substantially worsen the financial
states of those at risk.
Even if eviction does not appear to trig-ger calamitous financial insecurity—if
only because it was pre-existing—that does
not mean the newfound attention to the
problem is undeserved. Homelessness and
hospitalisation present enormous costs to
the rest of society. In New York the typical
eviction case is filed over back rent of
$3,900. This amount pales in comparison
with the $41,000 the city spends on each
homeless resident each year. The long-run
consequences of eviction on poor children
have not yet been thoroughly studied, but
are unlikely to be good. What the new find-
ings suggest is that intervention should
not happen only when a case is filed in
housing court. The nascent movement to-
wards providing free legal counsel by right
is a good one, because tenants with lawyers
are able to negotiate better terms.
But measures such as these can only
slow the pace of evictions. They will con-
tinue because for a significant share of the
population—particularly for black women,
whose incomes remain low—housing
costs remain high and access to housingsubsidies remains sporadic. The second
problem might be the most immediately
remedied, if there was the will. Approxi-
mately one in four Americans who are poor
enough to qualify for rental vouchers actu-
ally receive them, because housing assis-
tance is not an entitlement.
Instead, it is a literal lottery in which a
mere 25% of randomly selected hopefuls
receive vouchers. The losers get nothing
and the waiting list for a voucher in high-
cost areas such as Washington, dc, is more
than a decade long. “There’s a hollowing
out,” says Daniel Clark, a lawyer at Rising
for Justice, a free service which provides
advice to tenants facing eviction. “Those
people who do qualify have been insulated,
but those [who] do not get squeezed out,”
he adds. When asked where those people
go, Mr Clark gestures to an elderly black
man who has just shuffled into the hallway
dragging a suitcase. He was a former client
who had been evicted but is now homeless.
Every few days he comes by to linger out-
side their office. 7District of
ColumbiaMarylandVirginia3 kmHard exitSources: DC Office of the
Tenant Advocate; IPUMSScheduled evictions
May-Sep 2019
Black population
% of total, 2017 estimate0204060 80 100