1. (Prompt 3) Analyze a piece of data that you’ve gathered so far. This might be an early trend from your survey data, or an interesting thing one of your interview subject said, or a cool physical artifact that you gathered for your research. You should describe the piece of evidence as well as how you gathered it. In addition, spin out some ideas about what this data might mean for your project—maybe topics you’ll look into further going forward. Be sure to include a picture or audio file of the data you are examining.

“Cases – Abortions and Contraceptives.” {{Meta.siteName}}, www.oyez.org/issues/423. 

Since our topic is on abortion and groups tie to abortion, I knew that I needed to get a historical count of court cases pertaining to our topic. This way we could see the successes that the groups had during the history of this fight. During our research on abortion, I had stumbled upon a website by the name of Oyez. I checked the credentials of this website first, which happened to include the following: Justica, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School and IIT Chicago-Kent School of Law. Looking over the website there are 45 court cases that were brought to a court between the years of 1971-2017. These cases vary from state to national law, with a primary focus on the amendments to the US constitution, as well at the Hyde Amendment, which limited the use of federal funds to reimburse the cost of abortions under the Medicaid program in the 1980’s. All of these cases include media, petitioner, respondent, document number, decided by, lower courts involved, when it was granted, argued and decided, facts about the case, the question at hand, and the conclusion with how each judge voted. We will take a look at two cases, Harris v. McRae and Roe v. Wade.  

Harris v McRae was a court case brought to congress in 1980, and it took about 2 months to argue and decide the verdict. The appellant was Harris, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the appellee was McRae, a pregnant Medicaid recipient. The case was over the 1965 Medicaid program, that provided federal financial assistance to states that chose to reimburse certain cost of medical treatment for those who needed it. The case asked if the Hyde Amendment violated the right to privacy, the 5th or 1st amendment by not funding medically necessary abortions under Title XIX. The court ruled no on all accounts.  

This resource will come in handy on seeing which group, be it pro-life and pro-choice, won a court case for their cause. This will help weigh in on their successes in the court setting. I knew this site would be useful due to its credentials of giving a non-biased account of these court cases, along with the actual documentation of these court cases, sometimes involving an audio file. I knew my personal opinion couldn’t get in the way because this research needs to be as un-biased as possible, so I made sure my sources followed my high standard of non-biased information.  

2. (Prompt 2) Tell a detailed story about a moment from your research so far. This could be a description of an interview you conducted, or a moment where you and your partner sorted through survey results and had to figure out what to do next. Make this post a narrative, showing (not telling) a specific scene or moment that happened over the last few weeks of your research.

While doing my research, I thought it would be important to see how pro-life groups have changed over history. I knew that I needed to find a professional and unbiased piece of information to support my argument, or at least one that I believed to be accurate data with minimal bias. As a researcher, having unbiased information appealed to me greatly, because I could get to the accurate history of the topic. However, I knew due to the topic of abortion I knew it would be hard to find something completely unbiased. I began searching and found that many sites on pro-life were blocked on the school computers for “safety concerns”, even though I had been able to access them earlier. This was frustrating, but understandable in a way and continued my search for a source. At last I had found an article posted by The Atlantic, which was an account of the pro-life movement before and after Roe vs. Wade. It did have bias in there but seemed to give me useful and accurate information. I read that the political groups used to be more fluid on the topic, pro-life democrats and pro-choice republicans, and the reasoning behind pro-life and pro-choice groups. From other research projects, I could backup the fact that a lot of pro-choice groups had racist motivations, wanting African American Women and colored women to have less children. I knew this author had a bias towards pro-life, so while reading this I read in-between the lines to get an accurate representation of the data. I was happy with the source because bias will help us later in our research with wording and communication on both sides. However, our primary focus on our research is to put together a history of pro-life and pro-choice groups. This was my focus while reading the resource and will make a note of its bias so my partner and I can review it for communication later on.