This inference is alarming and it has garnered significant press, including articles in Vox and The New York Times. However, there’s a basic misunderstanding at the core of the research that could harm women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care—particularly affordable and safe abortions.

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Stephens-Davidowitz’s research mistakenly conflates “self-induced abortion” with “illegal abortion,” though the two terms apply to two very different procedures. A self-induced abortion is simply an abortion that can be conducted within the comfort of one’s home. That includes medical abortions, also referred to as the “abortion pill,” which can be used to end early-term pregnancies. An illegal abortion, on the other hand, is often what we think of as a “coat hanger abortion”—it’s one of the risky procedures women undergo when other options (such as self-induced medication abortions) are not available.

Self-induced abortions are safe and fairly common: They accounted for 31 percent of all nonhospital abortions in 2014. “People choose to self-induce for a variety of reasons,” said Jill Adams, founding executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law. “The flexibility of conducting the procedure at home on one’s own timeline is paramount, and self-induced abortion can be significantly cheaper than surgical abortion.”

But misinformation about self-induced abortion, namely that using the abortion pill is a dangerous practice, could ultimately make it harder to access. Anti-choice advocates and legislators have seized on this type of misinformation in the past, most notably through TRAP lawsTargeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, are specific legal requirements for abortion providers that are different (and more difficult to comply with) than the requirements for other medical practices. Examples include specifying specific hallway widths, staffing requirements, or admitting privileges. that require medically unnecessary updates to clinics that provide abortions as an indirect way to reduce abortions.

If that happens, it will hit women with few other options the hardest. Medical abortion is particularly crucial for people who would otherwise struggle to access reproductive health care, including people living in rural areas and women of color. Rural patients face clear physical barriers: 31 percent of women living in rural areas traveled more than 100 miles to access abortion services, and an additional 43 percent traveled between 50 and 100 miles. For women of color, who often suffer from a variety of barriers to abortion—such as financial instability, limited access to a broad range of providers, and distance from clinics—medication abortion can be the most cost-effective and low-risk abortion procedure.

There’s a chance that the searches Stephens-Davidowitz reports could simply represent an increase in medically accurate information. Telemedicine has revolutionized abortion care for the aforementioned groups. In 2006, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland in Iowa launched a telemedicine service that provided medical abortion care at rural clinics. The initiative was wildly successful: Research showed that telemedicine availability increased access to abortion care for people living in remote parts of the state. Moreover, the study showed that telemedicine availability increased access for women seeking abortion services at earlier gestational stages, for which medical abortion could be a silver bullet against the cost, distance, and stigma of an in-clinic abortion. In short, Google results for “self-induced abortion” may have ticked up because more women are simply aware that it exists.

While it seems intuitive that restrictive abortion laws would increase the incidence of illegal abortions, the inference that Stephens-Davidowitz draws about self-induced abortions is not necessarily backed up by the Google search data. Clear, detailed terminology is critical in discussing abortion, especially when the consequences can result in devastating outcomes for people seeking health care. Mistaken inferences, even when they have good intentions, have harmful consequences when placed in the nefarious hands of anti-choice activists—and can result in even more limitations on women’s health care.

This move came at the recommendation of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Tom Price. In many ways, it’s on brand with Price’s career as an enthusiastic advocate for restricting women’s choices: He has signed personhood acts that ban emergency contraception and abortion, opposed the Obamacare birth control mandate, tried to defund Planned Parenthood, and defended cuts to Medicaid that would deny millions of low-income women health care.

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On an intellectual level, Price’s cuts are frustrating because they represent another piece of a regressive puzzle the Trump administration is assembling in order to control women’s choices. And personally, I’m devastated because I know what these cuts mean to the communities that they will affect.

I attended public school for my entire K-12 education in Tom Price’s former district, where abstinence-only education is the norm. The single day of sex education I received promoted the idea that all sexual acts outside of a heterosexual marriage are dangerous and shameful, and did not make any distinction about whether these acts were consensual or not. It espoused gendered roles that posited women as defenders of their precious virginity, and put the responsibility on women to prevent sex from happening to them. That’s perfectly in line with the content requirements for sex education in Georgia: They consciously exclude information about contraception, coercion, orientation, and HIV/AIDS, and they stress abstinence and marriage.

Because I was lucky, and because I am privileged, I was able to go to a college with real resources—extracurricular trainings, a health clinic, and actual academic courses—that helped me unlearn the detrimental sexual education I received in high school. I got the practical information that I needed, and I started unraveling my skewed concept of consent.

When I attended a “Take Back the Night” rally my freshman year of college, I realized that my abstinence-only education had led me to view myself as responsible for sexual acts committed without my consent. Consequently, I felt shame instead of empowerment to take the steps I needed to recover. This is a common phenomenon for young people that experience abstinence-only education; when all expressions of sexuality are described as negative and shameful, the lines between consensual and nonconsensual acts become blurred.

College gave me a second chance at sex ed, but a lot of people don’t have that opportunity. For rural communities, low-income communities, and communities of color, high school sex education and community-based programs are often the only options available to acquire stigma-free, accurate education about consent, contraception, and sexual health. These populations already face myriad barriers to sex education, including culture, finances, and distance. In my home state of Georgia, there are only four Planned Parenthood clinics—one of the only affordable health centers with enough name recognition that people know to seek it out when they need help—and three of the four are located in the Atlanta metro area in the northwest corner of the state.

Still, teen pregnancy and birth rates are at an all-time low across the country. Georgia has experienced one of the most drastic declines in these rates, from the highest teen birth rate in the United States in 1995 to the 17th in 2015. The grants that Price slashed last week were a part of that story. The target audience of all of these programs are marginalized youth who have a demonstrated need for increased education. And these are the groups that are at the greatest risk for high teen birth rates: Rural counties reported an average birth rate of 30.9 (30.9 teens per 1,000 females aged 15–19), compared with the much lower rate of 18.9 for urban counties. Similarly, black and Latino teenagers experience teen pregnancy at rates twice as high as white teenagers. For these communities, removing teen pregnancy prevention programs that these grants funded will restore the negative effects of abstinence-only education that the grants were originally provided to combat. For example, one of the programs cut was run by the Augusta Partnership for Children Inc., which focuses on reducing teen pregnancy and STI rates in four rural East Georgia counties. In one of these counties, Augusta-Richmond county, the teen birthrate is 22.9 percent higher than the state average.

These cuts can’t be written off as a difference in ideology. I experienced firsthand the powerlessness that results from a shaming, abstinence-focused education, and it can be a matter of life and death for communities already on the margins. I had a second chance at a more holistic education, but it was due to luck and privilege that most folks in Georgia do not have access to. And when we’re talking about pregnancy, HIV/AIDS infection rates, and domestic and sexual violence, luck and privilege shouldn’t be the factors we have to rely on.

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Just a minor problem: Literally every aspect of the argument is dead wrong. Today’s young people are more educated than any previous generation, and the share of people living in poverty who have some college education has grown dramatically. Seventy-seven percent of people in poverty have the high school degree that Will claims is part of the golden ticket out of poverty.

Source: Center for American Progress

Even with those increased credentials and growing productivity, young people still can’t escape poverty because there are not enough good jobs. Unemployment and underemployment have been falling for years, yet the electorate gave a primal scream this past November, imploring policymakers to understand that their communities had been left behind. Take a look at the graph below: Even with unemployment falling, the share of families struggling to make ends meet remains high. Why? If you pay people poverty wages, workers will remain in poverty. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ solution is that if we simply take away people’s health care to pay for more millionaire tax cuts, that will help people find jobs faster!

Source: Center for American Progress

And marriage? Two poor people getting married does not make anyone less poor. As my colleague Shawn Fremstad explains in his issue brief, Partnered But Poor, “the vast majority of people in low-income families with children are in families headed by married or unmarried partners, as are most people in families with children that receive means-tested benefits.”

Moreover, this overemphasis on marriage can actually have detrimental effects and promote extremely dangerous practices when considering violence committed against individuals—usually women—within partnered relationships. Blindly promoting marriage over programs that support independent financial security—like jobs that pay a living wage or education that’s accessible for all—places even more pressure on survivors to stay in an abusive marriage or partnership.

We all want our children to get educated, work hard, and find partners who will treat them well (if they want partners). But George Will’s column conveniently forgets two things: At the macro level, in an off-kilter economy, where the gains from economic growth are concentrating among the wealthy few, all the hard work in the world isn’t going to change this basic economic reality: There are not enough good jobs for today’s young people, and this has implications for their marriage prospects as well.

At the micro level, life happens. People lose jobs. They get sick or have an accident that leaves them with a disability. They have babies in a country without paid leave or adequate child care, leaving families struggling to afford the basics for their kids. “The poor” aren’t some stagnant group that just needs to make better life choices. Seventy percent of Americans will turn to a means-tested benefit at some point during their working years, because Medicaid, nutrition, tax credits for working families—all the things at risk under this conservative Congress and president—are there for us if we fall on hard times. And most of us will.

Will’s column isn’t just wrong; it resurfaces a dangerous myth at a moment when the basic economic security of millions of struggling Americans is on the line.

Pence’s vote came as no surprise. A week into his tenure as vice president, he addressed thousands of abortion opponents at the 44^th annual March for Life. Days earlier, his administration instituted a particularly draconian version of the Global Gag Rule, which bans NGOs that receive U.S. aid from counseling anyone on abortion, and a week later it announced a nominee to the Supreme Court chosen in no small part because he poses an existential threat to Roe v. Wade.

All in the name of traditional family values.

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Pence has built an entire career on his family values narrative. In 2006, as a Congressman, he supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman—same-sex couples, he said, threaten to usher in “societal collapse.” In 2015, as governor of Indiana, he made national news for signing a bill that legalized discrimination against LGBT couples. A year later, he signed a law restricting access to abortion and—as part of his continued quest to make health care as awful as possible for women—requiring that fetal remains from abortions or miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy be buried or cremated.

Plus, there’s that bit of weirdness where he calls his wife “mother,” and won’t dine alone with women or attend events with alcohol unless she’s present.

The irony of these positions, which he insists are in defense of families, is that he is actively undermining them.

For starters, access to reproductive health care, which gives families control over if and when they have children, increases economic security. That makes families less likely to undergo conflict. On the flip side, laws that restrict access to abortion actively endanger families’ financial security. Generally, the birth of a child is a big expense—and if its’s unplanned or mistimed, it’s more likely to cause an economic shock or plunge a family into poverty. Financial stress, in turn, can lead to divorce or relationship dissolution as well as domestic violence.

And all those anti-LGBT policies? LGBT people have families, too—and when Pence denies them the right to get married or use the bathroom, he denies them the humanity that he grants families that look more like his own: “Christian, conservative, and Republican—in that order.” And when he opposes legislation that prohibits discrimination against LGBT workers, like he did in 2007 and again in 2015, he also jeopardizes their families’ economic security.

Even Pence’s intense devotion to his wife, which the internet mostly wrote off as eccentric codependency, works to undermine families. When he refuses to eat dinner or attend events with female staffers––allegedly to resist temptation from other women and to uphold the sanctity of his marriage––he denies them a professional opportunity that he makes available to men. One-on-one time with managers can lead to professional capital that makes salaries or promotions possible. Pence’s inability to treat women as professional counterparts, rather than objects of sexual temptation, excludes them from those opportunities for job growth. That brings us back to women’s financial security, and—once again—to their families.

Pence’s intense devotion to “traditional family values,” isn’t wholesome, or pious, or even just weird. It’s radical and dangerous. And less than 100 days into his vice presidency, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

That leaves House leaders in a tight spot, since their bill is deeply unpopular with lawmakers and voters. Late Wednesday night, in an effort to gain support from the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, they added new provisions that make the bill’s Medicaid cuts—which already slashed the program by $880 billion—even more extreme.

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The “manager’s amendment” includes a provision that encourages states to impose work requirements on adults who receive Medicaid. In theory, the provision ensures that “able-bodied adults” who receive Medicaid benefits are either working or looking for work. But in reality, this amendment could take health insurance away from Americans with disabilities or serious illnesses, and even new moms experiencing complications from childbirth—stripping them of the health care that would enable them to return to work.

Here are three Americans who would be at risk of losing needed coverage under House leaders’ latest proposal:

Robin Conrad — Center Ossippee, New Hampshire

In 2012, Robin was laid off and lost her health insurance. She went without health insurance while she worked temp jobs, until she was hired full-time nearly two years later. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer and was eventually forced to take long-term disability leave. Her employer terminated her job—and her health insurance—when she still had pressing health care needs.

Robin can get the medication she needs because she’s covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. She noted that without it, “I probably would not have been able to get coverage even if I could afford it, because my situation would have been considered a pre-existing condition.”

Sarah Borgstede — Belleville, IL

Sarah was married and was unemployed when she became a new mom.  She and her husband decided that she should stay home with their baby boy, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about paying for child care.  Her husband continued working as a musician and a teacher, but neither job offered insurance—he either purchased private insurance went without it entirely.

Sarah’s husband passed away when he was just 28, after a long battle with sepsis. Sarah says that if she been forced to look for work within 60 days of having a child—like the new Medicaid work requirements demand—she would have needed to work full-time just to afford child care, while her husband continued working 80 hours a week to cover the rest of the bills. Then, Sarah says, “my son would have grown up without both of his parents.”

Ericka McClung — Clendenin, West Virginia

Six weeks after she qualified for Medicaid coverage under the ACA, Ericka found out she had Stage 3 breast cancer.  After chemotherapy, radiation, and a double mastectomy she’s now cancer free, but she needs to continue hormone treatments for another eight years.

“If the cancer came back I could never afford the treatments,” Ericka says. “My whole entire family put together could not afford my treatments.”

Under the Heritage plan, the cuts would be dramatic. They would reduce funding for the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Justice, and State, and eliminate funding entirely for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

The cuts would negatively impact low-income people, people of color, and many other groups in terrifying ways. But there is one specific group that would be caught in a perfect storm of slashed services: survivors of sexual and domestic violence, who rely on many government services that would be on the chopping block.

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The proposed cuts would eliminate grants from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which funds services for survivors like transitional housing, legal assistance, law enforcement training, and support for people who have been sexually abused within the prison system. These grants have been incredibly effective—since the passage of VAWA in 1994, intimate partner violence has decreased by 64%. That success is due, at least in part, to the fact that they work in tandem with other programs, like Community Oriented Policing Services (also slated for elimination under the Heritage Foundation proposal), to make sure police have the staff, technology, and training they need to properly respond to survivors.

These cuts would also eliminate the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which is the single largest funder of civil legal aid. The most important legal actions that survivors take often happen in civil, not criminal, court—civil court is where they file for divorce from abusive partners, seek custody of their children, and apply for protective orders.

According to Lisalyn Jacobs, Vice President of Government Relations at Legal Momentum, “civil litigation can be a battle of who can wear down who first, and the survivor is far more likely to have less resources to stay in court for a long time.” Survivors are disproportionately likely to be low income, and have almost always been subjected to financial abuse that leaves them with limited access to cash. That makes it harder for them to afford a lawyer or endure a lengthy civil legal case—hence the need for civil legal aid.

The direct elimination of federally-funded support services and legal aid would create an extremely hostile climate for survivors, and the Heritage proposal would hurt this group in other ways as well. It would reduce funding for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, which in turn could affect funding for housing discrimination cases. Survivors are particularly vulnerable targets of housing discrimination—landlords often evict survivors or deny them housing specifically because they’ve been abused in the past. The DOJ Civil Rights Division currently extends legal protections to survivors to prevent this, and holds landlords accountable for any instances of biases or discrimination. This cut, then, would immensely weaken protections that survivors rely on in order to achieve safe housing and distance from an abuser.

The overarching conservative argument behind the Heritage proposal is that it’s the responsibility of the states, not the federal government, to protect survivors. But states do not have the finances, leverage, or incentive to provide the same level of service. For example, if victims or their abusers regularly cross state lines—like many people in the DC metro area do simply to commute to work—then state-level policing efforts to enforce protective orders would fall tragically short. Survivors’ mobility often relies on the portability of their protective orders, and only the federal government has the wherewithal to ensure interstate cooperation on these orders.

Each one of these proposed cuts individually would place survivors at increased risk, but combined they would leave survivors without police, housing, and legal protections that they desperately need. That paints a very dark picture for survivors—one that legislators should be mindful of when they draft the federal budget in April.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for clarity so that no readers are under the impression that the Trump Administration has released a formal budget proposal.