Acerca de

The leaked draft of an opinion that suggests the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade and its federal protection for access to abortion would put decades of gains made by women at risk — and it would mean dire economic consequences for some of them. 

 

In an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., warned that forcing women to have and raise unplanned children would make it harder for women to pursue education, increase their incomes and build wealth. 

 

“Pregnancy and parenthood is an economic decision,” she said. “This is going to shape people’s economic opportunities.” 

 

Porter, a single mother herself, said the stakes of rolling back Roe v. Wade would be high not just for women but also for families, communities and the country. Child poverty would rise, public health services would be strained, and social resources would be stretched to their limits. 

 

Caitlin Knowles Myers, a professor of economics and co-director of the Middlebury Initiative for Data and Digital Methods at Middlebury College, said legalizing abortion nationwide in 1973 was a historic inflection point. It ushered in decades of individual and societal benefits that improved the educational and economic fortunes of an entire generation, she said. 

 

“Legalization of abortion had huge effects on the ages at which women became mothers and the circumstances in which they became mothers,” she said.

 

The advantages of legal abortion were especially pronounced for historically marginalized populations, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The nonprofit organization found that high school graduation and college attendance rates for Black women rose after abortion was legalized nationwide. 

 

Based on historical data, the Guttmacher Institute, a health research and policy organization in support of reproductive rights, said 1 in 4 U.S. women will have abortions. The organization said that close to 60 percent of women who have abortions already have at least one child and that 60 percent are in their 20s. 

 

Myers estimated that U.S. women would be unable to terminate 75,000 unplanned pregnancies in the first post-Roe year alone. 

 

“Affluent women will find a way to make these trips” to states where abortion remains accessible, she said. “We’re very likely to have an increase in births to the poorest and most vulnerable families.” 

 

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper that overlaid credit reporting data on a research project dubbed the Turnaway Study, a University of California, San Francisco, project that studies the effects of unwanted pregnancies, compared women who successfully sought abortions with those who were denied the procedure. The economic disparities between the two groups were stark, said the lead author of the paper, Sarah Miller, an assistant professor of business, economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

 

“Our results suggest that being financially resilient, being economically self-sufficient, is going to be a lot harder if you can’t control the timing of when you have children,” Miller said. 

 

The amount of past-due debt incurred by the “turned away” women jumped by 78 percent compared to the average they owed before they gave birth, the report found. Negative incidents on the women’s credit reports, such as bankruptcies and evictions, jumped by 81 percent. 

 

Miller’s research also found that women who were denied abortions continued to struggle five years later, in large part because of the compounding impact of unexpected pregnancies on women’s ability to complete their educations and establish careers. 

 

When women leave the workforce to have children, they sacrifice opportunities to build wealth that many will never be able to reclaim. “Becoming a mother remains the single largest determinant of a woman’s labor market circumstances,” Myers said.