How Abortion Affects Education

By Jared Calloway and Philip Dial

A big problem we are facing today is the topic of abortion. Is it morally right or wrong,
should it be allowed or should it be banned. Our focus is on whether or not making the decision
to have an abortion can negatively or positively affect what level of education you attain in your
life. We chose to collect and analyze our data by state. We analyzed each state's total amount of
abortions, and compared it to the total educational attainment. We broke it into three categories
high school diploma, bachelors degree, and advanced degree (masters/PhD.)
Does Abortion Affect Educational Attainment?
Key Findings
A Recurring theme we found in all of our data and graphs is that a lower abortion rate equals
lower educational attainment.

In the graph above, there are multiple points clumped up into the lower left corner. This
means that as the total amount of abortions decrease in a state, so does the total amount of people
attaining a high school diploma. The same can be seen in the two graphs for bachelors and
advanced degrees. (See graphs below)

Solutions
Some argue that the
solution to this problem
is to push for more
women to start choosing
to get abortions more
than not. We wouldnt
agree with that at all, we
are taking a neutral
standpoint on this topic.
We suggest that the best
solution wouldn't be
protesting anti and proabortion, but to be
campaigning and
spreading awareness
about safe sex. If we
push for more people to
have safe sex, it would
decrease the amount of
pregnancies, which
would then give more
people the opportunity to
pursue school as far as
they need without being
held back by an
accidental pregnancy.

Limitations
On the U.S Census website they had a lot of data for educational attainment. The problem was
that it was either by race, gender, or income level. When we managed to find one that was by
state, it was in percentages, and we needed the total. We searched all over the internet to try to
find data that was by state, and gave the total amount. With no luck, we decided to do it all by
hand. We went through all 50 states, and looked up there population then with the given
percents, we calculated the exact number. What made things worse was that we had to do this
three times for all of our categories, with each state having a different percent so that meant 150
numbers in total.
Conclusion
In conclusion, with our research we found that the less abortions a state has, can directly affect
the education level of their citizens, and that the solution may not be arguing pro vs. antiabortion, but to inform and spread awareness about safe sex to avoid unplanned pregnancies.

References:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/
http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/
http://www.mccl.org/us-abortion-statistics.html