Morning Distribution for Thursday, May 19, 2022

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Thursday, May 19, 2022 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [Contraception techniques against a pink background.]( [Better Birth Control Hasn’t Made Abortion Obsolete]( By [Maggie Koerth]( and [Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux]( Has modern birth control made abortion a thing of the past? That’s what lawyers for the state of Mississippi want the U.S. Supreme Court to think. In a brief in the the pending case that could overturn abortion rights nationwide, [Mississippi’s lawyers wrote](, “[E]ven if abortion may once have been thought critical as an alternative to contraception, changed circumstances undermine that view.” Access to birth control has improved, they noted, and some methods’ failure rates are “now approaching zero.” According to Mississippi’s lawyers, effective birth control means people don’t need abortions anymore. But Sarah, a professional living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., did. She had always wanted four children, but four was it. So after her fourth child was born, she and her husband researched birth-control options and landed on the one that seemed foolproof: a vasectomy. “We’re very thorough people, very by the book,” she said. “We wanted to make very, very sure we didn’t have an accident.” Then, on Mother’s Day, Sarah found herself in her bathroom looking at two lines on a pregnancy test. She knew almost immediately that she was going to have an abortion. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: What Tuesday’s Primaries Could Mean For November]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.