The proposed project will track abortion facility operations and appointment availability in the first 12 months following the expected reversal of Roe v. Wade. I will produce and update an online interactive web application—”The Abortion Atlas”—that allows users to explore the shifting landscape of abortion access as measured by travel distances, appointment availability, facilities per capita, and gestational age bans. The application and associated scholarly publications will provide the opportunity to quantify disparate impacts on women in different regions of the country, on poor women, and on women of color. Users also will be able to download county-level measures of access for their own scholarly or journalistic purposes.
This work builds on my existing panel database of publicly-identifiable abortion providers, “The Myers Abortion Database,” and the associated county-by-month panels of travel distances I have calculated and published at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/8dg7r/)). It also builds on a survey I conducted in March of 2022 with a team of Middlebury College students who conducted “mystery calls” to all U.S. abortion facilities to measure next available appointment. If funded, the proposed project would allow me to continue to employ these students to assist me in producing quarterly updates of the abortion facility database and appointment availability surveys in the year following the expect reversal of Roe v. Wade and to disseminate timely information as the landscape of abortion access changes.