sarahslo
commented
6 years ago ok this is fascinating. i didn't know that they existed. can you map these? do each of these organizatios have different agendas or offer services that you can tell us about? i honestly would like to learn about these so what can you do to make this an education for those of us who know nothing?
Heartbeat International Care Net The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA)
Pitch
If you need to get an abortion in [state], it's gonna be (even more) difficult. (There are x times more CPC than abortion clinics)
Summary
I want to get the most accurate number of crisis pregnancy centers possible and compare it to the number of abortion clinics per state and/or city on a Leaflet map.
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC) are known to be pro-life but often mislead women in making them believe they provide impartial information or even an abortion. When reporting about this issue many articles refer to an estimate of CPC ranging from 2,300 to 3,500 or even more than 4,000 in the US. I couldn't find any linked sources explaining how they got to these figures, though. So my idea is to scrape the 3 biggest CPC organizations/networks in the US and obtain a more accurate count. Those are:
Details
It would be nice to show the exact distance between crisis pregnancy centers and real abortion clinics. Apparently they usually tend to locate themselves nearby an abortion clinic. I don't know if that's possible, though. I can imagine that many abortion clinics prefer not to post their exact location online.
For articles referring to different estimates see e.g. this TIME article or this doc linked by MotherJones
Possible headline(s):
Data set(s): So far I scraped one site, Care Net which included longitude and latitude (\o/)
For the number of abortion clinics I use data from the Guttmacher Institute in California.
Code repository: https://github.com/cfelke/data-studio/tree/master/code/03_CPC
Possible problems/fears/questions: It seems that NIFLA doesn't show any member organizations publicly, hence I can't scrape their data. The data for the number of abortion clinics is from 2014. To be sure that this is actually the latest data available I'm gonna write the Guttmacher Institute an email.
[Update] I talked to a researcher from the Guttmacher Institute, the data from 2014 is indeed their latest one but there's another study from last year with data from 2017! And it's open access, so I'm gonna extract the tables with tabula.
Work so far
Checklist
This checklist must be completed before you submit your draft. [x] I have already spent time with my data set, opening it, exploring it, etc [x] I have created a "DIARY.md" file to save links and list all of the terrible, no good problems I come across [x] My issue links to my data set(s) [x] My issue links to my code repository [x] My issue explains what I'd like to explore in the data set [x] My issue includes images - either inspiration or what I've done so far