Dataviz Midterm
In light of recent events, with the future of women’s reproductive health in the United States up in the air, I decided to tackle the issue of family planning. I feel like I see stories and stats on women’s health often, but the greater topic of family planning is rarely discussed. Through my three visualizations, I wanted to tell the story of family planning for women in the United States. The questions that guided my explorations were:
- Is the United States the best place for a woman to raise a family in the world?
- What are the most commonly performed medical services for family planning in the United States?
- What contraceptive methods are youth in the United States using?
According to the WHO, “An estimated 77% of women of reproductive age who are married or in-union have their need for family planning met with a modern method.” 77% may be not too far from 100%, but there is still a ways to go, especially since this number does not even include the growing number of mothers who are not married or in-union. I chose to represent the data using a slope chart, as they are ideal for representing the change in time. I chose a 30-year time window to look at, as that was the maximum range from the dataset. From this data, I can gather that the U.S. may not be the best place for a woman to raise a family, as the Western Pacific has a higher percentage of women who have their need for family planning satisfied. I can also see that the rankings of the continents have not changed in the past 30 years despite the numbers themselves changing. The last thing I noticed was that there is a consistent declining trend in the percentage of women satisfied with their family planning, which I found interesting, as one would assume that more women would be satisfied over time with the normalization of many more family planning methods.
This treemap shows rectangles that hierarchically represent medical services for family planning performed in the U.S. I chose to visualize this dataset like so as it makes seeing the physical change and variation in rectangle size helps the viewer interpret from a first glance which procedure dominates family planning in the U.S. In this graph, we are able to understand that exams and tests, or medical assessments, are the most popular family planning services performed. It is also interesting to see that the two most popular services, the pelvic exam and the Pap test (or Pap smear) are services generally offered for women, despite the fact that family planning can involve both men and women.
From this graph, the last visualization, I was surprised to see that birth control related procedures were not performed more. This led me to the question of what youth in the U.S. were doing to prevent pregnancy. I found a dataset showing the trends in various contraceptive methods in the U.S. for females aged 15–19. From this data, we can see that the two most common methods are some of the most easily accessible and cheapest. Condoms are often free in schools or family planning facilities and widely available, and withdrawal (or the pull out method) does not require any purchasing or prescribing of hormones. In the same vein, the more expensive procedures that require more planning and commitment (e.g. IUD and Implanon) are less popular. Another thing that I noticed from this graph was that the second and third most popular options are around half as popular as the first, and the fourth and fifth most popular options are half as popular as the second and third most popular. I would have expected the decline to be more gradual, but this illustrates that information and availability of some forms of contraception (i.e. condoms) are made more available to female youth in the U.S.
