A2-LjubaMiljkovic
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa08
Contents |
Picking a Domain
For this assignment I wanted to explore differences in abortion legislation, contraception use, and abortion rates around the world. I decided to focus on abortion in part because of the inflammatory nature of the topic, as well as for my personal education. I had very little idea how the rest of the world legislates abortion.
Initial Question
Because this is a topic I knew relatively little about, it was important for me to first familiarize myself with the state abortion legislation around the world. Then, I would compare contraception use and abortion rates around the world vis-a-vis the liberality of abortion legislation. I hypothesized there might be an anti-correlation between contraception use an abortion rates.
Finding the Database
The source of data for this assignment was the United Nations Data Explorer (data.un.org). They have hundreds of tables of data covering the gamut of social, legal, economic, political, and environmental statistics.
Visualizing Global Abortion Legislation
To better grasp of how different countries legislate abortion, I visualized a global map using small multiples. Each map represents a different reason for abortion. Countries in which it was legal to receive an abortion for that reason had a blue dot over them.
All countries permit abortion when the mother's life is in jeopardy. Fewer permit it to protect the mother's physical or mental health. Surprisingly few permit it in the case of rape or incest, mostly countries in Africa and the Middle East. I was surprised to find that the countries with the most liberal abortion legislation were not only to be found in the western world, but also in many parts of Asia and to a lesser extent Latin America. China in particular has very liberal abortion requirements.
Abortions and Contraception Use
I was hoping that from this UN data set I would be able to determine that contraception use is anti-correlated with abortion rates. After plotting these two factors for all the available countries, no strong conclusions could be made.
If these two factors were anti-correlated, we would expect to see abortion rates go down as contraception use goes up, a supposition that is not borne out by the data. My original guess that these factors are anti-correlated was based on the premise that decreased contraception use leads to more pregnancies and that all things being equal, more pregnancies would amounts to more abortions. It is not nearly that simple. As the first figure illustrates, not all countries have permissive abortion legislation. Clearly, cultural influences and socio-economic indicators play an important role in deciding whether or not to have an abortion, and at what age. None of this information is contained in the above visualization.
The flipside of this analysis is that these data cannot tell us whether or not contraception use can help reduce abortion rates for a given country. In countries with high contraception use, for example, it is unknown whether or not they would have higher abortion rates if contraception decreased.
Ultimately, in attempting to understand the correlation between contraception use and abortions, my visualizations only prompted further questions, which would require a far more detailed analysis to answer.
