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.
About the Data
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:
- abortiondocs.org for abortion clinic locations
- rhrealitycheck.org for information on TRAP laws
- Google Maps DistanceMatrix API for calculating driving time and driving distance between a city and a clinic
- Amadeus for data on cost of a hotel
- AAA FuelGauge for average statewide gas prices
- ThinkProgress.org for minimum cost of abortion by state
- Simplemaps.com for data on every US city and its location
- Bureau of Labor Statistics for wage data