The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-08)

G4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022

sity of Michigan economist Sarah
Miller, University of California at
San Francisco demographer Di-
ana Greene Foster and New York
University economist Laura
Wherry is forthcoming at the
highly ranked, peer-reviewed
American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy.
It’s deceptively difficult to
measure how abortions affect
women economically using tradi-
tional data sources, because, as
Foster points out, women who
seek abortions often start out
with significant disadvantages.
“Women who have abortions are
disproportionately low-income,
women of color and women with-
out a college degree,” she said. In
part, these economic disparities
can also reflect lack of access to
contraception and health-care
services.
Such disparities make compar-
ison groups hard to find, especial-
ly among communities that have
long been harder to track. The
Turnaway Study has been a life-
line for researchers.
The study was inspired by a
2006 conversation between Fos-
ter and a San Francisco abortion-
facility director. The director said
she wondered what happens to
women seeking abortions who
are turned away. Abortion clinics
like hers typically must deny
services to women who have
passed the gestational limit, or
the point in their pregnancy after
which the clinic or state prohibits
an abortion, usually during the
second trimester.
After that conversation, Foster
decided to follow the women who
were turned away because of the
gestational limit and compare
them with women who had come
in for an abortion just before the
deadline and were allowed to
proceed.
Foster worked with clinics to
recruit women for the study be-
tween 2008 and 2010. Over the
next decade, she would publish
more than 50 papers and a book,
“The Turnaway Study,” on the
results. The wide variety of topics
she examined included post-trau-
matic stress disorder and contra-
ceptive use, but one thing eluded
her — a deep economic evalua-
tion of the women’s financial
well-being.
That’s where Miller, the Michi-
gan economist, comes in. She
read one of Foster’s papers and
realized the Turnaway Study was
an ideal candidate for a tech-
nique she’d developed in previ-
ous work. She could ask a credit-
reporting agency to anonymously
match the participants in the
study to 10 years of detailed
credit information and get a com-
prehensive, impartial picture of
their financial health.
Miller and Foster took elabo-
rate steps to protect participants’
identities. “Everyone had incom-
plete data, so nobody would be
able to connect all the pieces,”

ABORTION FROM G1

Foster said.

When everything came togeth-

er, the trends were striking. It’s

not as though women who got

abortions experienced economic

success, Miller said, but getting

an abortion did appear to stave

off some of the more severe

financial problems.

When both groups of women

became pregnant, their financial

conditions worsened as work be-

came more difficult and expenses

rose. But in the year following the

women’s due dates, their fortunes

diverged. Both groups continued

to struggle financially relative to

their situation before they be-

came pregnant. However, those

who sought an abortion and

didn’t get one became signifi-

cantly more likely to miss bill

payments or have other black

marks on their credit reports.

That pattern remained for the

five years researchers tracked the

women.

Of course, the mere observa-

tion that one event follows an-

other doesn’t necessarily imply

that the first caused the second,

which is why economists spend

much of their time developing

strategies that prove a causal

link. In this case, by using well-es-

tablished statistical techniques to

compare the two group’s trajecto-

ries, Miller could infer that being

denied an abortion led to those

women’s financial struggles.

The analysis focuses on wom-

en who seek midterm abortions

and pregnancies. Most abortions

happen very early in pregnancies,

and 91 percent happen before 13

weeks. Typically, women get

turned away after that point, as a

clinic or state’s limits on abor-

tions kick in. More than 20 states

have abortion bans at some point

between 13 and 24 weeks, accord-

ing to the Guttmacher Institute, a

New York nonprofit. Many clinics

set their own, earlier limits.

The forthcoming results have

already gained widespread atten-

tion from a cademics who focus

on such matters.

Caitlin Myers, an economist at

Middlebury College, said she was

impressed by the rigor of Miller’s

analysis. “This is an expensive,

difficult study,” she said. “The

number of women they’ve been

able to follow already is quite

remarkable.”

Matching respondents to their

credit reports addresses common

problems with surveys like these.

For example, economic data is

often self-reported and subject to

personal bias, and people tend to

drop out of studies after a few

years. The study’s design “goes a

long way toward answering the

question of what happens to

women’s finances when they are

turned away from abortion ser-

vices,” Myers said.

Emily Guskin and Maggie Penman

contributed to this report.

Study shows markedly worse financial outcomes for women denied abortion

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Joanna Greenberg, left, and Lucy Rath of D.C. protest outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, a day after a leaked draft opinion suggested the court will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Sources: Sarah Miller, University of Michigan; Experian (national average)

Note: For context, the annual average U.S. credit score has been between 691 and 703 since 2012.

Being denied an abortion weighed

on women’s credit scores

Years before Years after

Predicted

due date

THE WASHINGTON POST

Those denied an abortion struggled more to pay the bills

Years before Years after

Predicted

due date

Allowed to

have an

abortion

Turned

away at

the clinic

321012345

530

540

550

Credit score:

560

520

This composite measure of financial distress reflects relative trends

in several separate measures of financial delinquency

321012345

Allowed to

have an

abortion

Turned

away at

the clinic

More

financial

distress

Less

financial

distress

BY PRANSHU VERMA

Elon Musk’s successful bid to
buy Twitter and turn it into a
free-speech hub has roiled com-
pany staff, polarized its user base
and become a flash point in the
broader culture war on what
people should be allowed to say
in public spaces.
Conservative Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Tex.) called the business
m agnate’s upcoming purchase
“the biggest development for free
speech in decades.” Liberal
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(D-N.Y.), predicted an “explosion
of hate crimes” because “some
billionaire with an ego” wants to
control Twitter.
Twitter is a rare platform al-
lowing ordinary people to direct-
ly challenge those in power, mo-
bilizing protests and amplifying
dissent. At the same time, it has
grappled with hateful speech for
over a decade, often targeting
women and people of color. Now,
with Musk’s looming takeover,
the future of the moderation
systems the company has pains-
takingly engineered for decades
is uncertain, leaving many to
wonder what the platform will
look like and who could suffer the
most.
To learn more, The Washing-
ton Post talked with Michael
Kleinman, the director of Amnes-
ty International’s Silicon Valley
Initiative and an expert on Twit-
ter harassment, along with Joan
Donovan, the research director of
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics and Public Policy
and a disinformation scholar.
“The more that people are
harassed, the less likely they are
to speak out,” Kleinman said.
“What I fear is the voices that we

most need to hear, the voices

most impacted by structural in-

equalities or racism, it’s those

voices that will be silenced.”

This conversation has been

edited for length and clarity.

If Elon Musk gets his way,

what do you think Twitter

will be like?

Kleinman: The short answer

is we don’t know. Trying to

predict what Elon Musk is going

to do is a dangerous game. That

said, based on his comments to

date, we are incredibly

concerned that Twitter as a

company will start paying a lot

less attention to issues of

hateful, abusive and violent

speech on the platform. Twitter

already has a tremendous

problem with the scale of hateful

and abusive and violent speech

on the platform, especially

speech directed at women and

Black and Brown communities.

Twitter has made limited

progress in the last few years,

and in particular the last year

and a half. But if you don’t have

senior leadership who’s focused

on this, or even worse, if you

have senior leadership who are

openly contemptuous of the

need for this kind of content

moderation, then we’re

incredibly concerned that we

will see the limited progress

that has been made further

erode.

Donovan: If we’re looking at

it through the prism of what

Elon Musk has said recently,

then he’s not interested in

making Twitter profitable. He’s

mostly interested in it because

he claims it’s the digital public

square of the 21st century. The

problem with that kind of

rhetoric is that a public square is

governed by the state. They have

many, many rules in the public

square.

But that goes against Musk’s

claim that he is a free speech

maximalist, which essentially

means that he’s going to

implement rules that say the

only kind of speech that is

banned from Twitter is speech

that goes against the law. But

online, most things are

permitted. We don’t have any

strong cyber stalking laws. We

don’t have any strong cyber

harassment laws.

So, to figure out what speech

is illegal would mean that

someone would have to be

arrested and caught. I don’t

think the rules that he’s setting

up or is imagining would be put

in place are ones that are

conducive to a very healthy

public discourse.

Who will get harassed on

Twitter the most?

Kleinman: In 2018, we did a

study of 778 women who use the

platform — activists, journalists,

and politicians in the U.S. and

U.K. What we found, looking at

1.1 million tweets that

mentioned this panel of 778

women that we studied, was that

7.1 percent of tweets sent to the

women in the study were

problematic or abusive. Women

of color — Black, Asian, Latinx,

mixed-race women — were

34 percent more likely to be

mentioned in abusive or

problematic tweets than White

women. And finally, Black

women are disproportionately

targeted, being 84 percent more

likely than White women to be

mentioned in abusive or

problematic tweets. It’s exactly

this population that I think

stands to bear the brunt of any

changes that Elon Musk makes.

With moderation so political

now, will Twitter do less of

it?

Donovan: Undoubtedly, it

already has started. So one of the

most important people in the

story of Twitter’s shift to Musk is

Vijaya Gadde. Musk very quickly

called her out using Twitter. She

was one of the decision-makers

that made the important

decisions about the New York

Post article about the Hunter

Biden laptop being removed, as

well as Donald Trump’s account.

So him, calling her out

publicly on the platform, has an

enormous chilling effect across

the entire organization, where

other employees are less likely to

speak up or less likely to want to

advocate for these content

moderation policies knowing

that if they do catch the eye of

Musk, they could be in the

public crosshairs.

Gamergate was a seminal

moment for Twitter and

online harassment. What’s

the impact of that been like?

Donovan: So, with

Gamergate, you have a bunch of

people using Twitter to express

their politics in a cultural war

which is: Should women and

feminists be gaming at all? What

harassers were able to do with

Twitter was to create networks

of fake accounts that would then

harass and impersonate other

people, which caused a lot more

confusion. This triggered a

response from Facebook where

they did bring in women who

are being harassed to try to learn

more about cyber harassment

and cyberbullying on their

platforms.

This to me was the genesis of

the idea that persists today that

these platforms are somehow

left- or liberal-leaning because

they were concerned about

women’s experience in

technology. And this angered a

lot of young men, especially men

in gaming. Men who posted on

Internet message boards that

believed that they own the

Internet. They didn’t think that

harassment was harassment,

they thought it was an

abridgment of their free speech.

And you can see it in the

meme style of Elon Musk, which

is to say that he tends to reshare

memes from certain Reddit

communities like r/conspiracy

and r/memes. And it’s those

kinds of signals in the culture

war that really emboldened

people who follow Elon Musk to

imagine that Twitter is now their

playground again.

What’s the impact of getting

harassed on Twitter?

Kleinman: Twitter is one of

the very few places in the world

where anyone can speak and

have a global audience. The

more that people are harassed,

the less likely they are to speak

out, especially on issues that

could be construed as

controversial, or on issues where

they run the risk of facing this

kind of massive blowback. So

then, what you’ll see is that the

global debate no longer has

contributions from a diverse set

of communities and voices. And

what I fear is the voices that we

most need to hear, the voices

most impacted by structural

inequalities or racism, it’s those

voices that will be silenced.

Q&A

Elon Musk wants ‘free speech’ on Twitter. But for whom?

DADO RUVIC/REUTERS

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently reached a deal to buy Twitter after

criticizing the social platform’s content moderation practices.