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Leah Libresco Sargeant's avatar

Yes, part of how I gloss the Turnaway Study is that both the women who achieved the abortions they sought and the ones who were denied both wind up fairly happy with the outcome they got and have few regrets. The moms whose children survive take a big economic hit, but usually aren't in a poverty trap—they have a (very!) hard few years and gradually achieve more stability.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

That is a good example of how people frame equivalencies only in one way. That is, if someone says X has the same outcome as Y, and the listener thinks Y is bad, they will decide X must be bad, but it is equally true that maybe Y isn't as bad as they initially thought, being only so bad as X which the listener had no particular problem with before.

My favorite example of that is a study someone threw up once that claimed "driving while talking on a cell phone is as dangerous as driving while drunk." My initial reaction was "damn... driving drunk must not be that bad, because I have ridden with people talking on cell phones, and done so myself, many times with no problems at all." Others reacted in horror, but frankly given how much people talked on their phones while driving in the days before hands free, the reaction was kind of silly.

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