Mapping Reproductive Rights in the United States using Felt

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years. This will lead to all but total bans on the procedure in about half of the states. — New York Times

What does reproductive rights look like in the United States after this ban?

Today I will walk you through how I built this map using Felt which is a tool you can use to quickly build your map visualizations. I have recreated the map as seen from reproductiverights.org.

The first task involved in building this map visualization involved getting the GeoJSON files for each state in the United States. GeoJSON can be thought of as a way to effectively store geographical data which can then be later be used with other systems.

A rough sketched GeoJSON of a state like Florida looks like the following:

{
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [
    {
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {},
      "geometry": {
        "coordinates": [
          [
            -81.02844223094672,
            25.156096650304903
          ],
          [
            -82.86169619975524,
            27.86956809521112
          ],
          [
            -82.63894056509452,
            28.886972894967826
          ],
          [
            -84.18661831882055,
            30.179156116835586
          ],
          [
            -85.10098290724139,
            29.743753235484476
          ],
          [
            -86.31847124877126,
            30.44002797395583
          ],
          [
            -87.83578648944143,
            30.264419233940885
          ],
          [
            -87.62660194230483,
            30.950744747228313
          ],
          [
            -85.13257554542756,
            31.047836929845786
          ],
          [
            -84.80186662160993,
            30.714276276152432
          ],
          [
            -81.52918553781258,
            30.344879031615548
          ],
          [
            -80.0068276843744,
            26.714726237827577
          ],
          [
            -80.3642759485158,
            25.314929256892455
          ],
          [
            -81.02844223094672,
            25.156096650304903
          ]
        ],
        "type": "LineString"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Eric Celeste has done all the heavy lifting and graciously created the GeoJSON file for every state within the United States.

After I got the GeoJSON file, within Felt I was able to easily upload the GeoJSON file.

After the file uploads successfully, the map re-renders with the various shapes of the states and you can zoom out to view them all.

I proceeded to then select and style my desired shape (state) with my colors. One interesting thing to note here is you can add additional information to the shape which is selected.

Last but not least, I added a color coded legend with the appropriate categorizations based on the severity of restrictions on abortions.

Overall, Felt was an awesome way for me to quickly build a prototype to get an answer to a question I had regarding reproductive rights. This is the first post of many where I document my journey of becoming a better map maker and trying to understand the world.

Check out the Map on Felt:

https://felt.com/map/Snapshot-Reproductive-Rights-In-the-United-States-vQiTU2yOTkWgXhxgKrZXiD

Do you have questions or feedback? I would love to hear it!

email: ducquynguyen520@gmail.com

twitter: Quy

Felt: https://felt.com/

Inspiration: https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/

Data Source: https://eric.clst.org/tech/usgeojson/

Credit: Census Bureau