The recent landmark ruling overturning the precedent set by Roe v. Wade has left liberal America with a lot of questions. Chief among them is what can the Democratic party do to protect women in states set to ban abortion. So far the answer seems to be nothing other than soliciting more donations to fund their doomed bid to stave off midterm electoral defeat.
A common critique levied at Christian reactionaries and their decades-long crusade to ban abortion is that they only care that pregnancies are brought to term and have very little thought about what happens to the baby afterward. This is a valid critique given the long history of right-wing attacks on the welfare state and the racialized demonization of “welfare queens”. However, recently Republicans have attempted to answer this accusation by proposing legislation to help women with unplanned pregnancies.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s Providing for Life Act would reduce restrictions on and the cost of adoption, provide funds to faith-based communities organizations to mentor young mothers, increase the enforcement of child support, expand the child tax credit and allow first-time mothers to pull from their social security benefits early with the promise of working longer to pay it back. It’s hard to imagine that his party would support efforts to spend more on the child tax credit or collect more child support from single fathers, but these ideas give the veneer of bipartisanship. It’s not difficult to imagine Pete Buttigieg proposing something similar to the idea of allowing mothers to access social security funds as a loan to be paid off later.
Most pro-choice liberals would reject Rubio’s plan as sufficient compensation for the loss of women’s bodily autonomy. The issue of whether or not a woman gets to choose to carry a baby to term is separate from what support the government can offer mothers struggling in poverty. The fact is that both sides of the abortion debate have primarily framed it as a moral issue. The question of whether an unborn fetus constitutes a life with legal protections vs a woman's right to choose what happens to her body. The Rubio bill is an attempt to mitigate the political damage that will come from the inevitable increase in childhood poverty and the needless suffering of women who seek abortions in a post-Roe world. However, it does indirectly point to a crucial contradiction that is often ignored in the debate over reproductive rights, namely that framing abortion as a moral issue obfuscates the material realities that inform women's “choices”.
What’s in a Choice?
Poor women have sex the same amount as wealthy women but are much more likely to have an unintended pregnancy due to a lack of access to the most effective methods of birth control. Women living below the poverty line not only have a hard time affording effective contraception but getting an abortion is also financially difficult. Especially if they live in conservative states that had already limited abortions as much as they could before the overturning of Roe. The financial barriers to reproductive health services make poorer women more likely to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term. This means that while wealthy women are more likely to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a large majority of women who get abortions are poor because they have so many more unintended pregnancies.
In a 2005 study by the Guttmacher Institute on the factors leading to women seeking an abortion, 74% of respondents cited reasons relating to financial security. Whether it be seeking education, caring for other dependents, or lack of support from the father, abortion was primarily an economic decision. Having a child while experiencing poverty often traps women in a vicious cycle of economic hardship.
The reactionary impulse is to attribute the large number of unplanned pregnancies among poor women to the behavior and cultural deficiencies of poverty, conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro has famously postulated that the key to escaping poverty is to simply not have kids out of marriage. But as mentioned before, women have sex the same amount across the socio-economic spectrum. The only difference is that wealthy women are more likely to be able to see a doctor about an IUD or contraceptive pills. However, when wealthier women do find themselves unexpectedly pregnant, they also tend to cite economic reasons for seeking an abortion.
For women in the workplace, pregnancy discrimination is a very real fact of life. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed in 1978 and went a long way toward ensuring expecting mothers could keep their jobs and continue working while pregnant. However, workplace discrimination against pregnant employees persists to this day. This holds for low-wage manual labor and service work, high-paying office jobs, and even companies run by and marketing to women. Liberal Hollywood may be the worst offender.
The issues with pregnancy in the workplace don’t end at childbirth. Women are often pressured to come back to work as soon as possible after having children. For low-wage workers, this can mean as soon as the next day. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) stipulates 12 weeks of unpaid leave for those who've worked at least a year for employers with 50 or more workers. This covers only about 60% of women in the workforce, and with the leave being unpaid, working women are forced to endure a disruption in their income right when their expenses are increasing to accommodate a new life.
The thing is, 12 weeks of unpaid leave is grossly insufficient for mothers and newborns. The first year in the life of a child is vitally important to both its development and the health of the mother. Healthcare experts recommend 6 months to a year of paid leave for new mothers, with 12 weeks of paid leave as the minimum. Research from the New America think tank calls for 52 weeks of paid leave for new mothers and provides a detailed breakdown of why that time is necessary. America is unique in leaving the matter of maternity leave to the market. This is a consequence of our national mythology of individualism and the fear of our beloved boogeyman: communism. The result is that only 21% of American workers have access to paid parental leave.
She Works Hard for Little to No Money.
Capitalism poses many problems for the sustainability of the human project. Healthcare, housing, and the environment take up a lot of the discussion, and rightfully so. However, more time should be given to the fact that, in our market economy, care work is grotesquely undervalued. Care work is broadly defined as labor that is geared toward the care and development of others. Occupations like teachers and social workers fall into this category, and while those jobs are compensated much lower than they should be, given the value they provide, the majority of care work performed in this country and around the world is completely unpaid.
If it's not obvious already, a big factor in why care work is so undervalued is that it is labor traditionally associated with women. The assumption is that care work provides intrinsic value to women who are by nature inclined to want to care for others. Material remuneration for this labor is at best seen as unnecessary or at worst incentivizing people to not enter more “productive” market sectors. This is a tragically myopic view of what matters to an economy.
Oxfam estimates that three-quarters of unpaid care work is performed by women across the world. This translates to 12.5 billion hours of work every day and if women were to be paid the minimum wage for this labor it would equate to $10.8 trillion every year, more than the global tech industry. We then have to ask ourselves if the minimum wage is sufficient compensation for the value provided to the economy.
Why is the act of financing production valued so much more than the act of raising, feeding, clothing, and providing for the emotional needs of the workforce that undertakes the physical act of production? Able-bodied and educated workers don’t magically appear out of thin air. Children who can spend their first year or more with their mothers in the house experience better developmental outcomes. Children who don’t grow up in poverty conditions are less likely to be swept up in the justice system. Giving women a year of paid maternity leave not only provides individual economic benefits to the mother, but women who can take the necessary time to bond and care for their infant children have better job continuity and productivity. Not valuing the role of motherhood and care work as beneficial to the economy as a whole creates unnecessary costs and burdens to society at large. So why don’t we?
The quick and dirty answer is the social science of economics taking on the characteristics of the patriarchal social structure it was developed in. Research into the economic value of care work is not seen as a serious scientific inquiry in the male-dominated field of economics, along with rampant sexism and an interview process that involves speaking to a group of men from a hotel bed, is a large part of the barrier for women looking to become economists.
Most of the gender wage gap can be explained by women being socialized into low-paying fields, chased out of high-paying fields by sexism and abuse, or spending most of their time engaged in unpaid care work. It's not that this labor doesn’t provide value to the economy, we have just decided to adhere to a male-dominated view of economic value.
Material Issues are Moral Issues.
All of this is not to say that we should be seeking to reduce abortions by making the process of childbirth and the work of motherhood more financially tenable. Or that most women who seek abortion would otherwise carry a baby to term if not for the potential detriment to career ambitions. There are plenty of non-financial reasons to have an abortion, namely in cases of rape/incest or medical risk to the mother. Some people are just not ready to have kids and that too is a completely valid reason to terminate a pregnancy. The point is that a woman's right to choose should exist separate from economic considerations. Piecemeal welfare programs, doled out through labor-intensive means-testing, obfuscate the fact that women are routinely asked to sacrifice their economic stability for the sake of social reproduction. Care work should be compensated. Raising a family should not be seen as a personal vanity project but a vital economic service to be invested in.
Programs like the child tax credit expansion helped a lot of families weather the economic turbulence of the pandemic and slashed child poverty rates. However, it was ended at the beginning of this year and its reinstatement is being blocked by conservatives (most notably Democratic sin eater Joe Manchin) enthralled by a zombie neoclassical economic framework that often decries the imagined perversity of satisfying people's material needs outside of the market. Major companies are very willing to provide support for employees in need of abortions services, not so much to provide a year and change of paid leave for workers with new children. The pro-choice movement is a well-funded one. Abortion is one of the few culture war issues where the wealthy find themselves in alignment with the poor and they can afford to put their money where their mouths are. However, there is a conflict between supporting a woman's right to choose and also supporting a capitalist market that has more influence over a woman’s choice than she does.
Though rarely stated by pro-life advocates explicitly, it’s clear that the reactionary position on abortion is much less concerned with the general wellbeing of children than it is with enforcing consequences. Namely the consequences that come with sex outside of marriage. Abortion is seen as a get-out-of-jail-free card for young women engaged in a libertine and immoral lifestyle. Conservatives don’t see themselves as limiting women's choices because women can simply choose to not have sex before they are willing and able to care for the child that might result from those carnal pleasures. Functionally, this means they see sex as a class privilege.
Not only is this a cruel worldview, but it’s also divorced from reality. The majority of women who receive abortions already have children. They aren’t seeking the ability to shirk responsibility, they are trying to meet the obligations they already have. However, as with most right-wing culture war issues, the cruelty is the point.
Its well documented that both women and men who nominally espouse pro-life views will seek abortions when the cost of having a child would harm their social and financial lives. This is the reality that underscores esoteric questions of when life begins or the matter of women's bodily autonomy. Those moral debates are important, for if women are to have their control over their bodies limited for the crime of having sex then they become second-class citizens. However, that moral debate is deeply connected to the irrationally unequal economic constraints that have been traditionally foisted on women. Women should have the right to choose, not the market.
Solidarity Forever.
i think you may be saying, and it seems to me, that many women are pro life from genuine religious or ethical roots, even when having a child will be an economic hardship. and the other thing i was thinking is about the comment that children who can be home with a parent for the first year of their lives thrive more than others. maybe you didn't mean that, but i know in many cultures, and in our country, children are raised in more communal ways that also lead to thriving. and i really appreciate how thoroughly, as always, you bring into the light the way women's choices about having children are so weighed down by economic hardship.
Church on Sunday, sleep and nod
Trying to duck the wrath of God
Preacher fillin us with fright,
They all trying to teach us what they think is right
They really got to be some kind of nut
I can't us it
Trying to make it real compared to what.