One of the not so tightly kept secrets of the abortion criminalization movement is that they want to ban birth control as well.

The reason for this is because they want to punish women for their sexuality, and now a study shows that when they get what they want, they succeed in punishing women:

In the US, there are many laws limiting when and how women can receive abortions. But there is almost no research on what happens to women who seek out abortions and are denied them. Now a team of health researchers at the University of California, San Francisco has completed a longitudinal study of a group they call “Turnaways,” women who tried and failed to get abortions due to local laws. The researchers found that women who received abortions were over six times as likely to have and achieve positive life plans than Turnaways.

The Turnaway study

To gather their unusual Turnaway data set, the researchers spent two years interviewing 956 women who sought abortions at 30 different abortion clinics around the US. 182 of them were turned away. All the women were interviewed a week after being turned away or receiving an abortion and then again a year later to assess the longer-term outcomes of their experiences. The team has also just completed interviews with the women that will reveal where they are five years after being turned away or not.

In its first analysis of turnaway data published two years ago, the team found that women seek out abortions for complicated reasons, with the most common being a feeling of financial unpreparedness. This earlier analysis also showed that 86 percent of turnaways chose to keep their children, and 67 percent of them would up below the poverty line a year later. By comparison, 56 percent of women granted abortions in the study were below the poverty line a year later. This finding lent credibility to many turnaways’ concerns that being financially unprepared would cause problems down the line.

………

Only 53 percent of the goals were aspirational among turnaways. Women who received abortions had roughly 85 percent aspirational plans. Women who had children but did not parent them had 80 percent aspirational plans. The upshot was that turnaways who kept their children had far fewer positive goals for the future than their counterparts who received abortions.

Of all the goals measured, 47 percent were achieved. There was little difference between turnaways and women who had abortions when it came to achieving their goals. However, as the researchers write in their paper, women who received abortions “were significantly more likely to have both an aspirational plan and to have achieved it” than turnaways who kept their children. Upadhyay was quick to point out that overall, most of the women’s goals were aspirational. “They all had high hopes,” she said. But Turnaways “were much more likely to have negative goals.”

What this latest phase in the Turnaway study reveals is that not having access to abortion can negatively impact women’s lives. As Upadhyay and her colleagues put it in their paper, “Whether or not a person has aspirational plans is indicative of her hope for the future. Without such plans or hopes, she misses out on opportunities to achieve milestones in life.”

Put bluntly, the Turnaways had fewer hopes, so they had fewer reasons to push themselves toward what they defined as better lives.

Destroying these women’s lives is one of the goals of the anti-abortion movement.

You won’t ever hear them say it, but it is clear from what they do.