Spring is wrapping up, which means the weather is warming, grills are coming out of hibernation, and we are weeks away from finding out how the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court is going to overturn decades of precedent in the service of the Federalist Society agenda. Ah, summer.
The news is impossible to predict, but this one seems like a fairly odds-on scenario: Roe v. Wade as we know it is likely coming to an end this June, thanks to an imminent ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In that event, American women in at least 26 states will find themselves living in places where abortion is totally or partially banned—this in addition to the millions who already live in places or under conditions in which abortion is so difficult to obtain it may as well be banned.
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There will be much arhythmic celebratory dancing and off-center high-fives by elderly red state pro-lifers, as well as hugging and fist-pumping by all of the creeps who stand outside abortion clinics clutching rosaries and harassing women—to say nothing of the smug “calm down” exhortations from the same dippy centrist pundits who swore this wouldn’t happen back when advocates called it on Nov. 9, 2016.
And then, conservatives will dust their hands off and pick a new target: Griswold v. Connecticut. Birth control.
Just a decade ago, that claim would have sounded absurd. Now, it’s practically a conservative talking point; Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee called the ruling that guaranteed married couples access to contraception “constitutionally unsound” in a statement last month.
But have conservatives actually thought this through?
Mind you, I’m not talking about asking Republicans to acknowledge the humanity of women who might not want to be pregnant. On that they’re a bit of a lost cause.
Just this week, Ohio Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt, doing her best snapping turtle-meets-Aunt Lydia impersonation, recently referred to a theoretical situation where a 13-year-old victim of rape became pregnant as a “an opportunity for that woman” to have a baby and simply give her rapist’s baby to a member of her family to raise. And male lawmakers who couldn’t successfully label a chart of the female reproductive system if their own lives depended on it are calling for ectopic pregnancies to be implanted into the uterus (a medical impossibility) rather than aborted (a medical necessity, otherwise the mother will die).
I’m talking about one of conservatives’ favorite security blankets: the economy. Every election, it’s the economy this, the economy that. And nobody is really pressing them on the absolutely dismal economics of forcing more and more women to give birth who either don’t want to or who aren’t fiscally equipped to.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s say Roe is overturned or weakened, and Griswold later gets overturned. What then?
We know that when abortion is outlawed or birth control access is hampered, wealthy and privileged women will still have access to it. They’ll be able to travel to places where it is safe and legal or obtain one secretly and extralegally. Abortion will still be available to conservative lawmakers’ mistresses.
Will women forced by the state to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth take, as Jean Schmidt might say, the “opportunity” to give their child up for adoption in droves? No, actually.
In a study published in 2020, the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research group at the University of California-San Francisco examined the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. It found that of those women who were denied abortions due to gestational limits, only 9 percent of those women gave their children up for adoption at birth. (Similar research from the post-Roe era found that legalized abortion dramatically decreased the number of adoptions, but social stigma against single mothers doesn’t really compare now to what it was in the early 1970s.)
This means that more than 9 in 10 women who were denied abortions in a recent study decided to at least attempt to raise the child themselves. (Because, it turns out, giving a child up for adoption is often incredibly traumatic.)
Many women will find a way around the bans and end their pregnancies before being forced to give birth; some will not. In a post-Roe world, the women who will most likely be unable to obtain abortion care will be poorer, browner, and less educated than those who will. This will result in poorer, browner, and less educated women having larger families than they’d planned or wanted. (An aside: Pregnancy and birth are expensive—even more cost prohibitive than traveling out of state for an abortion. I still haven’t seen a detailed plan on who is paying for all these extra births, and how.)
We also know that after children are born, in families across all economic strata, responsibilities around child rearing fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women. Depending on the level of wealth and education of the women in question, those responsibilities are often outsourced to other women who barely make enough money to make ends meet themselves—teachers, nannies, and day care workers.
During the height of 2020 pandemic restrictions, middle and high-income women dropped out of the workforce in droves to look after their own kids, in many cases because their access to child care was disrupted. Meanwhile, teachers, nannies, and day-care workers left their respective professions in large numbers for a variety of reasons—including low pay, high stress, and demands within their own families. As a result, even families that can pay the high cost of childcare expenses can’t always find what they need, because it’s simply not available.
What happens when the forces that have already led to a worker shortage in the U.S. are exacerbated by laws further restricting reproductive freedom?
Low-income women will drop out of the workforce to care for their own children. The childcare and teacher shortages will probably get worse. More middle-income women will also drop out of the workforce because they can’t find or can’t afford childcare. High-income women will deal with similar pressures, albeit not as acutely as more marginalized women. And what happens when women drop out of the workforce in huge numbers for long periods of time?
The economy takes a hit. A big one.
What’s the conservative plan for handling that? Forcefully redistributing children? It’ll take a few more SCOTUS vacancies and a handful more Amy Coney Barretts before the Supreme Court is there, ideologically.
I’ve yet to hear conservatives acknowledge that pregnancy is physically difficult, that childbirth is one of the most painful things a human being can experience, and that adoption is often a traumatic event for birth mothers and is sometimes traumatic for children. But those ignored truths will impact the lives of millions, their ability to participate economically, and by extension the entire American economy.
I don’t think that’s a conversation that anybody on the right wants to have yet. Not when you’re a dog about to catch that car.
