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Understanding the link between racial diversity and access to abortion services is crucial for promoting social justice and equity in healthcare. Investigating this relationship helps identify and address disparities in access to essential healthcare services. By understanding factors that impact access to abortion, policymakers can make informed decisions and develop strategies to improve public health outcomes.
Exploring the relationship between diversity and access to abortion services is the main objective of this study. The hypothesis is that there is a positive correlation between racial diversity and access to abortion services.
The top six most diverse states in the US that allow legal abortion, namely California, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Maryland, and excluding Hawaii due to its small size and limited number of abortion clinics, were selected for this project. The top and bottom counties in terms of diversity index were chosen from each state, resulting in a total of 70 counties. CSV files were manually created for each state with the names of selected counties and their diversity index data collected from the US 2020-21 Census website. The geolocation of the county seat of each selected county and the names of verified abortion clinics were used as input for the Google Maps Matrix API to calculate the shortest driving distance and time from each county seat to its nearest abortion clinic, which were then written into JSON files. The resulting data, including diversity index, population, geolocation, and shortest distance and duration from the county seat to the nearest abortion clinic, was stored in a folder named stateOutput as separate CSV files for each state. The collected data was then summarized into a big dataframe and visualized in the Data Analysis and Visualization notebook.
The data was divided into two samples, highDI and lowDI, based on the diversity index of each county. HighDI contains counties with a diversity index greater than or equal to 0.5, while LowDI contains counties with a diversity index less than 0.5. Google Matrix provided numerical values for distance and duration calculations, which were stored in Shortest_Distance_value and Shortest_Duration_value variables. These variables were used to represent distance and duration.
The T-tests were conducted on the means of Shortest_Distance_value and Shortest_Duration_value for highDI and lowDI. The null hypothesis was that counties with high diversity indices and counties with low diversity indices would have the same driving distances and times to nearby abortion clinics. The alternative hypothesis was that counties with high diversity indices would have significantly shorter driving distances and times to nearby abortion clinics than counties with low diversity indices. The p-value for both t-tests was less than 0.05 (0.033 for driving distance and 0.0189 for driving time), indicating that counties with high DI and counties with low DI do not have the same abortion access.
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