How abortion access can impact personal finance: Turnaway Study author

Abortion is an important issue for many voters, especially young women, heading into the November election.

Abortion access is about more than politics or health care; it’s also a personal finance issue, said Diana Greene Foster, a demographer who studies the effects of unwanted pregnancies on people’s lives.

Foster, a professor at the University of California San Francisco, led The Turnaway Study, a landmark research study on the socioeconomic outcomes for Americans who are “turned away” from abortion. The study tracked 1,000 women over a five-year period ending January 2016. The women in the study had all sought abortions at some point before the study commenced; not all received one.

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In November, voters in 10 states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and South Dakota — will choose whether to adopt state ballot measures about abortion access.

Such ballot measures follow a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 that struck down Roe v. Wade, the ruling that had established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

Nationally, women under age 30 rank abortion as the most important issue to their vote on Election Day, according to the KFF Survey of Women Voters, which polled 649 women from Sept. 12 to Oct. 1. It ranked as the third-most-important issue among women voters of all ages, behind inflation and threats to democracy, according to the poll from KFF, a provider of health policy research.

Abortion is among the least-important issues for registered Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll of 9,720 U.S. adults conducted Aug. 26 to Sept. 2.

CNBC spoke with Foster about the economics of abortion access and the financial impacts of the end of Roe v. Wade.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Greg Iacurci: Can you describe the population of women who typically seek abortions in the U.S.?

Diana Greene Foster: One good thing about The Turnaway Study is that our demographics closely resemble national demographics on who gets abortions.

More than half are already parenting a child. More than half are in their 20s. A small minority are teenagers, even though lots of people think teenagers are the main recipients.

It’s predominantly people who are low-income. That’s been increasingly the case over time. It’s become disproportionately concentrated among people with the least economic resources.

GI: Why is that?

DGF: I think wealthier people have better access to contraceptives, even after the Obamacare-mandated coverage. Not everyone benefits from that. Not all states participate in that.

[Medical providers] still give…