On the East and West coast, clinics (shown as yellow dots) are fairly common, but across the more rural middle of the countries, a few clinics in a single city will serve women who need to drive from hundreds of miles away. The couple clinics in the Denver/Boulder area alone are responsible for an area larger than the entire Northeast.
Why is this? Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws single out abortion providers for unnecessarily strict regulations. One such law is a mandatory wait of 24-72 hours between a consultation and the abortion process. These laws force women driving long distances to a clinic to need a hotel stay for 1-3 nights in some areas of Texas, Michigan, and the Midwest.
Other laws contribute to what we see in this chart: the utter lack of abortion clinics that are accessible to more rural cities. TRAP laws are mandating unncessary requirements on clinics - such as mandating the size of their hallways or closets or paint color, or requiring the admitting privileges at local hospitals (something that has nothing to do with medical qualification) - and clinics who can't afford to make the required changes are forced to shut down.
These laws are shutting down clinics and making it more costly and more difficult for women to obtain an abortion if they need or want one. These laws are being passed under the guise of helping women, but requiring women to spend more money and time on this procedure is by no means helping them.
This was created as a two-week project for the Data Science class at Olin College of Engineering by Anne LoVerso and James (Zhecan) Wang.
Many people aren’t aware that even in states that have legal abortion clinics, there are a large number of laws in place that make it hard for clinics to stay open and hard for women to get abortions. Our visualization is to raise awareness about the arbitrary restrictions lawmakers have placed on women’s rights and hopefully encourage people to take action or vote to prevent laws. Viewing our visualization will try to convince people that women who want abortions are often unable to get them, and that we as a society should be doing something about this.
Our visualization accomplishes this by showing several degrees of difficulty women across the country face. We show both the time cost and monetary cost a women would have to spend, depending what US city she lives in. The color-coded map shows a quick visualization of which areas have reasonable access to clinics, and which areas require a lot of work to get your abortion. We even found that in some areas, because of the mandatory waiting period between a consultation and the actual procedure, some women would have to either take two trips to the clinic, or book one to three nights in a hotel, just to get their abortion.
We used Python for inital data collection and analysis, and d3 for creating the dynamic JavaScript of this webpage. All our code and data is available in our GitHub repo.
Data sources: