Data Viz and Abortion Narratives

A sister project to the ongoing work of looking at the underlying poll numbers used to craft narratives about abortion being broadly popular or not is looking at maps.

People try to change minds by pointing out different practices in comparable places. At its worst this takes the low form of the logical bandwagon fallacy, and at it’s best this can serve to temper and debunk wrong-headed fear of the (relatively) unknown (a point the late great Justice Antonin Scalia made about the use of international law at the US Supreme Court—see “Foreign Law” in Scalia Speaks, although I know that video recordings of the 2006 speech exist online somewhere).

With abortion, these comparisons usually take the form of peer pressure. So here is one graphic from Statista, using Center for Reproductive Rights representations of data.

All told, this is one of the more naked ways to shill for a position, using overtly charged coloring of traffic-light green and red to uncritically represent a biased assessment of laws (Center for Reproductive Rights). Generally, to be frank, I think Statista is a good idea poorly executed, epitomized by their hiding sources behind paywalled accounts and uncritical reproductions of facially suspect data, such as the following graph of reported undesired weight gain during COVID among US adults:

But we were talking about abortion. Here’s the BBC, using more tone-neutral colors to represent data from the same advocacy group (the chart is from 2018 though, hence the difference in status in Ireland).

The BBC’s color scheme proved popular; here’s the Council on Foreign Relations using, once again, the same data, much more recently (last month):

I hadn’t heard of the Council on Foreign Relations before, but here (same webpage) is how they recap recent changes in China’s laws:

China. China liberalized its abortion law in the 1950s and promoted the practice under its one-child policy, which was enacted in 1979 in an effort to curb population growth by restricting families to one child. The policy, under which abortion services were made widely available, came with severe coercive measures—including fines, compulsory sterilization, and abortion—to deter unauthorized births. China raised this long-standing limit to a two-child policy in 2016, along with other incentives to encourage population growth amid a rapidly aging population. In 2021, it increased the limit to three children, and China’s State Council issued guidelines on women’s development that called to reduce “non–medically necessary abortions.”

I don’t know if you caught that amidst its wording of “widely available,” but China’s one-child policy meant that mothers who became pregnant had abortions forced on them by the government. It is one of the gravest acts of evil in either century that it spanned.

The story from these maps is that America is among the nations that are, well, maybe in some contexts brutal colonizers that export their provincial values and boss around the rest of the world, but in this context are developed, sophisticated, and have attained high levels of consciousness.

Now, ironically, the low-grade Statista was the most honest of those three in its including an asterisk about how “gestational limits vary.” After all, laws are detailed things, and there be devils. Nations aren’t restricted in choosing just one of five or four abortion laws to adopt. And what are said gestational limits, exactly? One more map:

Suddenly a more granular picture snaps into focus. Week thresholds vary greatly, in one sense, because jurisdictions (i.e. EU nations and US states) have lots of different ones. But in another sense there is a clear pattern: the US is far to the Left of most of the EU. Even “red” places like Florida, Idaho, and West Virginia have abortion laws that are to the Left of Sweden and France.

Now, I think it’s indisputable that a human life is a human life. I see no moral distinction between murdering someone who’s 4 weeks old or 4 years old. I think just laws shouldn’t, either.

But from a forensic perspective, examining the facts on the ground, it is worth noting that many laws do draw such discriminatory lines in the sand—that they do so at many different points in the sand—and that many states’ lines are embarrassingly alone in the world for doing so.

The Mississippi law poised to occasion the long-awaited downfall of Roe and Casey was enacted (notes the leaked Dobbs decision, pp. 6-7) with the factual finding that (at the time) “only six countries besides the United States ‘permit[ted] nontherapeutic or elective abortion-on-demand after the twentieth week of gestation,’” viz. Canada, China, the Netherlands, North Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. Whatever you think of the 6 countries named (and you probably have mixed feelings), that’s scant company (even including, as the Dobbs draft does in a footnote, the much more recent company of Iceland and Guinea-Bissau too) to have in a significant policy like abortion.

Sometimes the question isn’t whether something is true. It what else is true.