Browsing by Author "Solazzo, Alexa"

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    Different and Not Equal: How Poverty, Race, and State-Level Abortion Laws Shape Abortion Timing Among US Women
    (2015-12-03) Solazzo, Alexa; Gorman, Bridget; Denney, Justin; Cech, Erin
    The number of regulations surrounding abortion has increased drastically in recent years. How these laws relate to abortion timing is important to assess since the cost, safety, and accessibility of abortion varies by how many weeks pregnant a woman is when the procedure occurs. Research examining how state laws relate to abortion timing generally use rates or data from vital statistics, and while informative, such methods are not able to examine how these laws may be disproportionately associated with the abortion timing among select groups of women, including poor or non-white women. To fill this research gap, I analyze data from the nationally representative 2008 Abortion Patient Survey, with appended information on state laws regarding abortion in 2008. I find that the relationship between abortion timing and state-level abortion laws, such as requiring a waiting period and that doctors perform abortions, is different for black and Hispanic women compared to white women, and that poverty status moderates the association between state laws and abortion timing for black and Hispanic women, while for white women these relationships are the same regardless of poverty status. Overall, this research illustrates the relevance of state-level abortion laws for shaping abortion timing among women, and the importance of considering how these relationships differ across racial and socioeconomic groups.
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    Education and health: The joint role of gender and sexual identity
    (Elsevier, 2020) Zhang, Zhe; Solazzo, Alexa; Gorman, Bridget K.
    Background: Prior research has found that education's association with health can differ by social positions such as gender. Yet, none of the existing work has tested whether the relationship between education and self-rated health is equivalent across sexual orientation groups, and additionally, if these associations differ for men and women. Deploying the intersectionality perspective, we expand current debates of education as a resource substitution or multiplication to include sexual orientation. Methods: We answer these questions using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a probability-based sample of adults living in 44 US states and territories for selected years between 2011 and 2017 (n = 1,219,382). Results: Supporting resource multiplication, we find that compared to their same-gender heterosexual counterparts, education is less health-protective for bisexual adults, especially bisexual women. Gay men and lesbian women, on the other hand, seem to have similar associations of education with health as their same-gender heterosexual counterparts. Turning to gender comparisons across sexual identity groups, we find that resource substitution may operate only among heterosexual women when compared with heterosexual men. Conclusions: In sum, this study suggests that the relationship between education and health may depend on the intersection of gender and sexual orientation among U.S. adults.