We often discuss abortion as an issue of bodily autonomy, personal rights, and reproductive justice. Of course it’s all of those things, but it’s also an economic issue. Access (or lack thereof) to an abortion profoundly affects women’s lives by determining if, when, and under what circumstances they become mothers. Whether or not women have access to abortion can change the direction of their lives, affecting educational attainment, labor force participation, and overall earnings. Economist Caitlin Myers breaks down her research into the subject and provides examples of the causal link between abortion access and economic outcomes in women’s lives.
Caitlin Knowles Myers is the John G. McCullough professor of economics at Middlebury College and Co-Director of the Middlebury Initiative for Data and Digital Methods. She’s known for her recent research on the impact of contraception and abortion policies in the United States.
Twitter: @Caitlin_K_Myers
Opinion: Economists can tell you that restricting abortion access restricts women’s lives https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/29/abortion-economics-supreme-court
Lack of abortion access will set US women back, economists warn https://www.ft.com/content/61251b31-0041-461c-bd33-aacf2f13fe10
What can economic research tell us about the effect of abortion access on women’s lives? https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-can-economic-research-tell-us-about-the-effect-of-abortion-access-on-womens-lives
The economic reality behind a Mississippi anti-abortion argument
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/business/mississippi-abortion-law-economy.html
The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion https://www.nber.org/papers/w26662
The Turnaway Study https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
In this country, we tend to frame the question of abortion around religious or moral questions or bodily autonomy and stuff like that. But this is a policy that has enormous economic implications for women and particularly for poor women.
Caitlin Myers:
As it happens, economists actually have a lot of objective answers about abortion. We know lot about how abortion access impacts people’s lives.
Jessyn Farrell:
At the end of the day, denying abortion is about power.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in Downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
Jessyn Farrell:
I’m Jessyn Farrell and I’m Senior Vice President at Civic Ventures and a former state legislator.
Nick Hanauer:
So Jessyn, today on Pitchfork Economics, we get to talk to a super interesting woman. Caitlin Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and specializes in research on the impact of contraception and abortion policies on economic outcomes in the United States. And in this country, we tend to frame the question of abortion around religious or moral questions or bodily autonomy and stuff like that. But this is a policy that has enormous economic implications, particularly, obviously for women and particularly for poor women.
Jessyn Farrell:
I think it’ll be really interesting to dive in how abortion is an economic issue and that access or lack of access to abortion really affects women’s lives by determining, if, when and under what circumstances they become mothers.
Nick Hanauer:
And I think that this is obviously a more consequential economic issue in the United States than it is in many places because A, of the amount of poverty we have in the country for a developed country and how miserly our safety net is, in particular for parents and mothers. The United States is effectively the only developed country in the world that does not mandate paid maternity leave. There’s no real subsidies for childcare, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you have an unwanted pregnancy in Finland and choose to keep that child, your chances of falling into poverty are way, way, way, way lower than they are here in the United States. So it’s just a higher stakes issue here as an economic matter for women than it is in many other places.
Jessyn Farrell:
And interestingly, economists have long been somewhat silent on this issue and so this is going to be a really great conversation to dive into the actual economic impacts of lack of access or access to abortion on women’s economic lives.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, let’s talk to Caitlin.
Caitlin Myers:
I’m Caitlin Myers. I’m an Applied Microeconomist at Middlebury College. I am also the Co-director of Middlebury’s Data Science and Digital Methods Initiative. I am an economist who primarily specializes in isolating and measuring causal effects for complicated social questions. And I have spent more than the past, gosh, decade studying the causal effects of abortion policy and abortion access on people’s lives.
Nick Hanauer:
Our country’s discourse often treats abortion, mostly, as an issue of bodily autonomy, personal rights, et cetera. And of course it is all those things but it’s a profoundly economic issue as well. So talk to us about why and how it is.
Caitlin Myers:
So I think a lot of times when you say the word abortion, people immediately start to think about the ethical and moral questions surrounding abortion that divide many Americans. I won’t begin to offer an opinion or some sort of resolution to those questions, what I bring to the table as an economist is answers to the objective questions of fact about abortion. And as it happens, economists actually have a lot of objective answers about abortion. We know a lot about how abortion access and people’s lives and we’ve studied it in the context of the 19th century. We’ve studied it in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, the Roe Era. And we’ve studied it in contemporary context of changing abortion access with abortion regulations that have been enacted in recent years.
Nick Hanauer:
Tell us a little bit about what you found about the causal link between the economic lives of women and abortion access.
Caitlin Myers:
So that causal link really is a chain. And the first link in the chain is the causal effects of abortion access on when people become parents and the conditions under which they become parents. So what we know is that in the Roe Era, the legalization of abortion caused dramatic changes in American family formation. It caused the fraction of women who became mothers as teens to decline by about a third. It caused the fraction of women who married as teens decline by about a fifth. And that decline in marriages was almost completely explained by a decline in what at the time at least was often called a shotgun marriage but which now we would describe more as a marriage that was resulting from an unplanned pregnancy.
So we know that about the Roe Era and the next question from the Roe Era would be, if abortion access is shaping American fertility and American families in this way, does it then have further effects on women’s human capital attainment, which is how economists refer to things like education and acquiring workforce skills and on their employment, the types of occupations they enter, the probability that they’re poor, the conditions that their children grow up in? And what economists have seen as we’ve explored those further links is that we can see the first order effects of abortion on fertility then reverberate through women’s lives.
Jessyn Farrell:
It seems like this is so intuitive that there is a deeply economic impact on this question of bearing children. But can you really dive into that? What financial challenges do women experience when they’re specifically denied an abortion?
Caitlin Myers:
And actually, I will dive into it but let me start by talking about the notion that it’s intuitive. I might have thought that also and in fact, in this case that has come before the Supreme court this year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, this case that is widely expected to determine the fate of Roe and Casey. I actually assumed that facts like these, about the first order effects of abortion on women’s lives or the second order effects on their finances, were simply at this point known and that economists wouldn’t have much of a role to play in this case. I thought that this case would be more about constitutional law. And where I really went wrong and failed to, I guess, have much imagination, is in the types of arguments that the state of Mississippi would bring to the court to try to convince them not to worry about overturning the 50 year precedent of Roe and the almost 30 year precedent of Casey.
And the argument that the state of Mississippi has made repeatedly in this case, is that abortion access, well, I’ll say it’s actually somewhat paradoxically, they’ve said two things. One, there’s no way to know the causal effects of abortion access on people’s lives. And two, there is no causal impact of abortion access on people’s. So they’ve essentially told the court, “Don’t you worry about precedent, don’t you worry about this concept of societal reliance of people having come to rely on abortion. Actually, it doesn’t matter.” And that was really jaw-dropping for me as an economist to see that because there are plenty of things that economists continue to disagree on but the fundamental fact that childbearing is a very important part of women’s economic lives is something that’s widely known. And we have a lot of evidence on the particular role of abortion policy. So I might have thought it seemed intuitive also but it seems that there’s a lot of people who are willing to argue against those facts.
Jessyn Farrell:
That is really fascinating. I know we want to get into the deep dive on the financial consequences and impacts but it is worth just spending a little time on that particular point that you just made. I mean, what I want to know is, why haven’t we had this discussion about abortion access in an explicitly economic framing in the last 40 years? What is the history around economists’ engagement on this issue and why haven’t we really gone there? Because it seems like this is just a big, significant part of the debate.
Caitlin Myers:
I think that is a really good question and one that I also ask myself. I think the answer is probably complex. These tools of causal inference that economists have been applying to study the causal effects of abortion policy, they are relatively new. They really took off in the late ’90s. And so I would say that economists silence in the Roe Era on these issues and our silence, frankly, in the early ’90s and the Casey Era, is partly because we hadn’t fully developed and applied these tools to all of these questions. That said, we did have a lot of answers that were salient to those conversations that we simply didn’t offer. And I think that part of it, perhaps I’m going to speculate some, but I think part of it comes from a lack of diversity in the field, who is an economist who enters the field, what questions do they ask, what questions they translate to a broader audience?
I can remember being in grad school 20 years ago and being cautioned, not to be a woman studying “women things”, that it would hurt me in my career. It’s become something of a joke in my household where I’ll jokingly say, “Oh, this lady science.” But I do think that there’s a certain resistance to studying some topics but I would also say that’s eroded a lot recently as our field has become more diverse and has applied our powerful tools to a lot more questions so that whatever the explanations were for why economists weren’t more involved this 20, 30, 40 years ago, now, what you can see is that economists have spoken up and we’ve spoken up with a very loud voice in this case. The Economists Amicus Brief that was filed in Dobbs has more than 150 signatories attesting to the simple facts laid out in the brief about the salient of abortion policy to people’s lives.
Nick Hanauer:
The position that the state of Mississippi is taking is, it would be astonishing if it was not Mississippi, I suppose. But it just [crosstalk 00:11:48]
Caitlin Myers:
Well, I know. I am from the Deep South. I’m from very rural West Virginia and rural Georgia on the Alabama border. And a lot of times when I see these political arguments surrounding abortion, I react with a lot of compassion and understanding for the deeply held moral beliefs on both sides of this that really fuel a lot of this controversy. I truly believe there are good well-intentioned people on both sides of the debate. The thing that really upsets me is seeing this, what feels to me like just an abandonment of science and abandonment of fact. Mississippi brought forth oral arguments in this case that as an economist, I would have nothing to say about but to simply fly in the face of science it’s upsetting to me.
Nick Hanauer:
Again, if the state of Mississippi had simply said, “Abortion is wrong and against God,” or whatever. I mean, it’s not a position I personally agree with but it is a valid argument but as you put it, contravene the known facts about the economic impact that an unwanted pregnancy and child has on somebody’s life, it’s just astonishing.
Caitlin Myers:
It’s not only astonishing but it’s really troubling to me on two dimensions. The first is that I fear oral arguments in this case suggested that the court was willing to ignore the facts that the economists have put forth. Even more troubling for me, if Roe and Casey are overturned or substantially weakened, what economists know is that this is going to have repercussions throughout the lives of poor women and their families. And if states want to pretend that is not the case, that there is not this impact, I worry about the kind of further frame of the social safety net they might string up to capture these vulnerable families. If you believe it just doesn’t matter to their lives, then you also don’t have to step in with other forms of social support for them.
Nick Hanauer:
No, for sure.
Caitlin Myers:
And that really troubles me too.
Jessyn Farrell:
So let’s get the facts on the table. What kinds of financial challenges are women experiencing when they’re denied abortion? What is the science behind this? What do you know?
Caitlin Myers:
So let me start first with who these women men are because I think that’s a really important piece of the context to understand the facts. So nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. And of those unintended pregnancies, around close to half of them end in abortion. Now, the rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion have been falling in recent years but even so, it is still the case that about one in five pregnancies in the United States are aborted every year. That is a little bit over 1% of American women of reproductive age having an abortion in each year. And if those rates were to continue, it would be about one in four American women would have an abortion in their reproductive lifetime. So the first fact that I would put forth is abortion is safe. It is currently legal and I’m riffing off an old democratic party platform, it is not at all rare.
It is something that happens quite frequently and the people who are seeking abortions aren’t doing so randomly, they’re generally doing so in response to difficult life circumstances. They are overwhelmingly adults. About 97% of them are age 18 or older. They are mostly mothers, about 59% of them are already parenting children and they’re overwhelmingly poor and low income. About half are living below the poverty line. About three quarters are low income and more than half are experiencing or reporting a disruptive life event like having lost a job or broken up with a partner or experiencing threatened eviction or homelessness.
Nick Hanauer:
Can I ask a clarifying question?
Caitlin Myers:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nick Hanauer:
So you said that about one fifth of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion, did I hear that right?
Caitlin Myers:
Yes. That’s correct.
Nick Hanauer:
How many is that in numbers?
Caitlin Myers:
So the rates are falling but at that last count, it would be somewhere around 900,000 a year.
Nick Hanauer:
Abortions a year?
Caitlin Myers:
Yes.
Nick Hanauer:
So could be 900,000 births +/- in the absence of abortion?
Caitlin Myers:
Well, let’s talk about that. It could be but let’s talk about some of the other behavioral responses. My answer is going to be more complicated than that and the number won’t be 900,000 buts it’s going to be big. So let’s think about who these women are. So the first point is that there’s a lot of them. The second point is that they are in difficult life circumstances. And the third point is we know that they experience travel distances as a substantial barrier or an obstacle to seeking an abortion. And that’s the piece that ties into your question, Nick, that I think is really key here. If Roe is overturned, abortion is not going to immediately become illegal in the entire United States. What is going to happen is it’s going to return a great deal of the regulatory power to individual states. And the individual states are going to have more control, more power over their abortion regulations. And we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next.
We have states that have trigger laws on their books already where they say, “Basically the second Roe is overturned, abortion will be illegal here.” So we know what’s going to happen the next day. There are states that do not have trigger laws on the books but through their regulatory actions have pretty clearly signaled that they would ban abortion quite quickly if Roe was overturned. And then we have a handful of states that are a bit of a gray area because, let me give you an example. One of them is Kansas. So Kansas’ legislature looks pretty likely to want to ban abortion but the Kansas State Supreme Court has recognized that the state constitution protects the right to abortion, which is preventing the legislature from enacting a trigger ban. However, they have a ballot initiative in Kansas to amend the state constitution. So it’s a gray area there because really it’s the fate of that ballot initiative that will determine whether Kansas bans abortion or not.
All that to say, we can draw a map of the United States, the day after Roe is overturned, maybe a month after Roe is overturned and we have a pretty good idea where the abortion providers that currently exist will have been shut down and where they will remain. And it’s not a country that entirely goes dark. It’s a country with dramatic increases in inequality of access. It’s a country where women across a very wide swath of the South and the Midwest, their providers will close. Their states will ban abortion. And the question is, how many of them can get out and get to another state where it’s still available?
Jessyn Farrell:
And it’s not just then about inequality of access to abortion. It really becomes inequality of economics and inequality of income, inequality of wealth accumulation based on gender. And I would love to hear more about what you know about the actual economic impacts because what’s striking me so much as we’re talking about this. Nick asked that question of how many abortions are happening every year. There’s that upstream question too, which is, how many of those abortions were the result of not having access to adequate birth control, not being in a consensual relationship? All of those questions have not typically been framed as economic questions. They’re framed around reproductive justice. They’re framed around bodily autonomy but consent, birth control, abortion is not typically framed as economic but all of those things are culminating in this really disparate outcome for women. And I would love to hear you talk about what we know about how access to abortion is really impacting women’s economic agency.
Caitlin Myers:
So what we know, first of all, is that if those states go dark, if Roe is overturned, about a third of the women living in those states are unlikely to be able to reach providers elsewhere. And based on all available evidence right now, the majority of them are likely to give birth as a result. That’s the short takeaway of a complicated literature on their responses. So what happens next to these women? We estimate that it’s likely about 100,000 of them in the first year after Roe is overturned. That’s probably the number. And they are likely to experience dramatic deterioration of their financial security among other things. So we have evidence that when women who are seeking abortions are turned away or unable to obtain them, that they experience increases, for instance, in past due debt, increases in bankruptcies.
We have evidence from, let me talk about one study in particular that I think is very good. It’s called the Turnaway Study. It’s from scholars at University of California, San Francisco and a few other places. And they compare groups of women who are seeking abortions. And they show that right up until the point where all of these women are appearing at providers, they have pretty similar trends in their financial circumstances. And then these women are reaching providers and some of them are discovering that they’re just past the gestational cutoff to obtain the abortion while others are just under it. So some of them are turned away and others who are at a pretty similar stage in their pregnancy, they’re able to get the abortion. And it’s at that moment, that critical moment in their lives that you see their financial lives just diverge and you see this 78% increase in past due debt, 81% increase in bankruptcy records for the women who are turned away.
And it’s perhaps not so surprising when you consider that these women were pretty vulnerable to begin with and that’s why they were seeking the abortion and that they were doing so with kind of rational expectations about their lives, if they weren’t to obtain the abortion.
Jessyn Farrell:
And I’d love to get into some of the specificity around that because it’s not just that there is this connection between not being able to get an abortion and economic impacts, it’s that there are very specific policies that we have in place that undermine a woman’s economic agency, even throughout her pregnancy. When I was a legislator, I led to pass a pregnancy and a anti-pregnancy discrimination bill in Washington State. Prior to 2017, you could get fired for being pregnant on the job if you had to go to a prenatal appointment, if you needed to get drink water, et cetera. So there are all these things that actually literally make it hard to be pregnant, hard to then have a baby because you may not have access to paid family leave. You may not have access to childcare. There are very specific things that we are choosing not to do to support women’s economic agency. And so I’d love for you to talk to us about, really, the financial penalties that women pay for being mothers, the motherhood wage penalty.
Caitlin Myers:
So people are generally familiar, I think, with the gender earnings gap or the gender wage gap and familiar with the fact that in the United States right now, women earn, on average, about 80% of what men earn. I’m not sure everybody’s aware of the extent to which motherhood plays just a fundamentally important role in determining that gap. In fact, if you look at the earnings trajectories of men and women prior to the point at which they might become parents, they look a lot more similar. Women’s earnings are a lot closer to men’s and this is true in the United States and other developed countries. It’s the moment they become parents that their earnings dramatically diverge. In fact, almost nothing happens to men’s earnings at the time they become father, it’s women’s earnings that just plummet. It’s interesting to me, that part of the state of Mississippi’s argument for abortion, not mattering to anybody’s lives is that somehow we have managed to legislate away this motherhood gap. And it’s absurd because we could still see it in the data, it’s there, obviously it hasn’t disappeared.
But also I think for anybody who has been a parent, is a parent or has paid any attention to parents, the notion that we now simply, effortlessly balance parenthood with our working lives is just frankly rather silly. I also think that there’s a real kind of, a set of class blinders on this to some extent in the public discourse because I will see people pointing to, for instance, Mississippi’s own attorney general, who is a single working mother who has achieved greatly, as an example that women can now have it all. And I think this is a highly educated woman with financial resources. The resources available to her look really different than the resources available to these financially fragile, low income women, the majority of whom are mothers who are seeking abortions. Very large numbers of them, lack access to affordable childcare, lack access even to unaffordable childcare because a lot of them work in shift work that makes it extremely difficult to obtain childcare at all. A lot of them lack access to any sort of family leave, paid or unpaid, formal or informal.
And should they choose to try to rely on a social safety net because it’s very difficult for them to balance work and parenting an infant, they’re facing a social safety net that’s really frail. If they live in Mississippi, for instance, the maximum welfare benefit that Mississippi will pay to a family of three, they have just raised it from $170 a month to, I believe it’s $220 a month now, to support a family of three for a month. So just the notion that women who are experiencing an unintended pregnancy could choose to carry it to term without financial consequences just flies in the face of this evidence and also just common sense.
Nick Hanauer:
So what role can economists play in the current fight against limiting abortion rights?
Caitlin Myers:
Well, I ask myself that question a lot because I really don’t think of my role as an economist as being the role of an advocate. I have never marched in a protest related to abortion policy or reproductive rights. I’m an engaged citizen but I don’t see my professional role as being one of an activist. And so I honestly paused for a long moment before I spearheaded the Economist Brief in Dobbs and decided it was time for economists to speak up, to ask myself exactly that question, “What is our role?” I think our role is to provide facts. These are social questions. These are questions that economists have been asking and answering credibly and rigorously for years. And I think we have to believe in evidence-based policy and we have to believe that coming forward as a profession to say, “This is what we know about the motherhood gap. This is what we know about the economic impacts of motherhood. This is what we know about the people seeking abortion. We know about how they experience barriers to abortion access and what happens next in their lives.”
I want to believe that evidence will inform good policy and I think our role is to speak up and share it as broadly and clearly as we can.
Jessyn Farrell:
I mean, I think that’s a really great way to look at it. I continue to just be struck by how infrequently we frame the debate as an economic one.
Caitlin Myers:
I alluded to it briefly but I just want to talk about the class blinders that people and some economists, judges, I suppose kind of coastal urban elites might have on some of these issues, that really strike me. I have heard more than one time when I explain the solid evidence we have that an increase in travel distance of even 50 miles to the nearest abortion provider will prevent about a fifth of women seeking abortions from being able to reach that provider to obtain it. And it’ll be met with disbelief. People will say, “Surely if you need to seek medical care, you’ll figure out how to travel 50 miles. Surely this is a decision of such life import that people will figure it out.” And I think that’s absolutely true if you’re a upper middle class, educated person with a car, like I am, if I need medical care, I’ll find a way to get 50 miles.
I think there’s just these blinders to the incredible, logistical and financial challenges that poor mothers who are credit constrained and experiencing disruptive life events can experience as they’re trying to just figure out those logistics. And I think it’s just important to recognize that this is about income inequality and wealth inequality and inequality being able to access care
Jessyn Farrell:
That’s right.
Caitlin Myers:
The other piece I mentioned, that’s a personal piece of this is, I have been really frustrated by the desire among some in this debate to point to prominent women with children who are parenting while achieving professionally, as examples that women really can have it all. This is entirely anecdotal and personal but it frustrates me as a woman who’s been in two different situations in my life. I grew up in the rural Deep South. I had a single mom. We did not have a lot of resources. I saw how hard it was. As an adult, I lost my first husband in a car crash when our children were two and four and suddenly found myself a single mother, which I had never planned for, anticipated, just didn’t see coming. And I can tell you for as horrible and difficult as that was for me emotionally, I was completely aware the entire time that having enough money for good, reliable childcare so that I could keep working, made all the difference in my life and my ability to manage my single motherhood with everything else and to provide financial support for my children.
And it just frustrates me to hear these stories of women who have similar resources told as though this is, the circumstances that all women face as they try to navigate working motherhood.
Jessyn Farrell:
Thank you for sharing that personal element to this because that is really the case underlying all of the economic research that we like to talk about on this show is how it impacts people’s lives. So thank you for sharing that. We always wrap up by asking one final question. And that question is, why do you do this work?
Caitlin Myers:
I do this work because I am fascinated by questions of why and how, of really diving into understanding why and how the social phenomena that we see around us have come to be. Being a social scientist is a really interesting job. And for me, a bit more than a decade ago, I became interested in why and how the gender gap in economic outcomes had come to be and what was continuing to maintain it. And you can’t start answering that question without getting interested in reproductive autonomy and reproductive control. Abortion access again and again, kept appearing in the data and the analysis as a really important part of the story.
Jessyn Farrell:
Caitlin, thank you so much. It has been so wonderful to talk to you.
Caitlin Myers:
Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate the opportunity.
Nick Hanauer:
Thank you, Caitlin. Nice to meet you.
Caitlin Myers:
You’re welcome.
Jessyn Farrell:
So Nick, that was a really interesting conversation. I have to admit to you I’m pretty angry as we debrief it and reflect on this conversation, particularly because at the end of the day, denying abortion is about power and it is about the ability to maintain the gender hierarchy.
Nick Hanauer:
Keeping them barefoot and pregnant.
Jessyn Farrell:
Exactly, because the best way to maintain power for men is to keep women dependent. Full stop. And while the issues of bodily autonomy, personal rights, reproductive justice, are really important and real moral questions, we really have left the economic issues out of the debate. And when we’re leaving the economic issues out of the debate, we are really leaving out the power part of this discussion.
Nick Hanauer:
No, absolutely. Although, Orthodox Economics doesn’t think of it in these terms. Economics is just all about power. Power is the dark matter of economics, in fact.
Jessyn Farrell:
Exactly.
Nick Hanauer:
You can’t see it but it does make up 85% of what’s out there. And I think the debate over abortion is largely the debate over hierarchies and power and it just is what it is. And I think that the economics profession has been remiss in not addressing this in a more forceful way and not in articulating in a more forceful way, what the true economic impacts are, not just on women and poor women but on the economy overall.
Jessyn Farrell:
And what I really appreciated about this conversation is that we’re talking about facts here, to the extent economics has this kind of dark matter element. This particular conversation is laden with known information, with facts, ranging from, not just the gender wage gap but the motherhood wage penalty and how there is a direct relationship to childbearing reproduction and the policies that we, quite frankly, do not have in place to support mothers, whether it is things like subsidized childcare, paid family leave but even the regulations around wages like tip credit and the minimum wage. Women working in the service industry who do not know what their schedule will be. How do you go to a prenatal appointment if you have to worry about losing your job because you can’t get a shift moved? That is what is really striking that there is quite a bit that we do know about how this issue impacts women, particularly the class and racial dynamics of this issue.
But that when judges, I think of Justice Amy Coney Barrett talking about how you can just have a baby and then put it up for adoption. Well, actually, women get fired for being pregnant in this country, still. So the fact of being pregnant has economic impacts and then that obviously impacts the longer term agency of a woman.
Nick Hanauer:
I guess my concluding thoughts are this, that this effort to restrict reproductive rights access, just another version of the exclusionary top-down, everything’s for us, nothing is for you sort of approach that neoliberal economic policy has embodied for the last 40 or 50 years. And it’s sort of the opposite of what we now know really works, which is we all do better when we all do better that economic inclusion, political inclusion, social inclusion, isn’t sort of a nice thing to have if and when we have growth, it’s actually the thing that creates economic growth in market economies and access to abortion is just a canonical example of allowing people to be included in the economy and in the society in a good way. And if there is a silver lining here, it is that this ridiculous effort contravenes the best economic evidence. And hopefully at some point in the future, people will choose prosperity over poverty and a thriving society and middle class over the sort of exclusionary world that creates poverty that this kind of thinking reflects.
Jessyn Farrell:
Amen.
Speaker 4:
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