"At an America’s Senate Banking
Committee hearing shortly after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion
overturning Roe v. Wade, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that curtailing
the right to an abortion “would have very damaging effects on the economy.”
Women denied abortions would lose educational opportunities and see their “odds
of living in poverty” or their “need for public assistance” rise. And this
would have follow-on consequences for their children, who would then “grow up
in poverty and do worse themselves.”
Yellen’s comments offer a useful
place to start the final essay in my series unpacking the major pro-choice
arguments that have circulated since the Dobbs decision. The first two columns
were focused on physical and psychological issues, arguments
about the personal burdens borne by women asked to carry unwanted pregnancies
to term.
This one will focus more on economic
and sociological issues, and particularly the belief that crucial elements in
our current American way of life — economic prosperity, female opportunity,
social stability — depend on the ready availability of abortion.
This belief has several points in
its favor. First is the general reality that, while many other developed
countries have somewhat more restrictive abortion laws than the most liberal
U.S. states, almost none have the sweeping bans pursued by the pro-life
movement, the kind that attempt to limit abortion to the most exceptional or
dangerous situations. In general, prosperity, modernity and pro-choice policies
appear as a package deal.
There are a few notable outliers — Ireland before 2018, Chile for the
moment, Poland — but overall the pro-life movement’s goals are genuinely
revolutionary, even utopian, relative to the pattern of the post-1960s
developed world. And a certain skepticism is always appropriate when someone’s
proposed system doesn’t have many existing models and the world as we know it
tends the other way.
Then there is the specific evidence
that the use of abortion can be associated with better socioeconomic outcomes
for individual women. In the last column in this series I mentioned the
Turnaway Study, an investigation comparing the lives of women denied abortions
to similarly-situated women who obtained them, arguing that its evidence
doesn’t necessarily support the simple pro-choice frame in which it is often
placed. But that study does buttress Yellen’s economic claims, showing that
women turned away from abortion do face subsequent socioeconomic hardship
relative to women who obtain one. So if you simply generalized from those
individual outcomes to the societal level, you would expect a pro-life society
to be somewhat poorer and more stratified.
Indeed, even firm opponents of
abortion sometimes allow that this might be the case. In an essay in these
pages, Matthew Walther argued that pro-lifers needed to
be prepared for the reality that “an America without abortion” might well “mean
more single mothers and more births to teenage mothers, increased strain on
Medicaid and other welfare programs,
higher crime rates, a less dynamic and flexible work
force, an uptick in carbon emissions, lower student test scores
and goodness knows what else.” The principle that one must not kill an unborn
child, he argued, will necessarily disrupt a society built on denying an unborn
right to life, and thus abortion opponents need to be prepared for a difficult
transition to the more just and decent society they seek.
There is wisdom in this perspective;
a movement with utopian ambitions needs a recognition that it’s seeking a
genuinely different society as well as a different set of laws.
But at the same time it concedes too
much to the Yellen worldview, the abortion-as-economic-benefit analysis. And
one reason to believe this comes from the work of Janet Yellen herself.
In 1996, Yellen and her husband,
George Akerlof, joined their fellow economist Michael Katz in a paper titled “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock
Childbearing in the United States.” They were attempting to explain
what seemed like a riddle: In a world where strategies to control births had
improved significantly, with contraception available and abortion legal, why
were so many more women having children outside of marriage?
Raising kids alone is difficult, and
single parenthood imposes substantial economic burdens, so you would think that
in giving women more choice in when they carry a pregnancy to term, more women
would choose to do so with the child’s father wedded and present. Instead, the
opposite was happening, with post-1960s, post-Roe America seeing an
unprecedented rise in the share of children born outside of wedlock — a rise
that continued for more than a decade after 1996, before finally leveling off
around 40 percent of all births, compared with 5 percent in 1960 and about 10
percent in 1970.
Part of the explanation that the
paper proposed was that there had been a fundamental change in the reciprocal
obligations of men and women. A system in which sex could be separated from
fertility decisively, with abortion a guaranteed backstop for anyone who wanted
it, made it much harder for women who wanted commitment and children to make
long-term demands of the men who wanted to have sex with them. As Yellen and
Akerlof wrote, in a Brookings policy brief
adapted from the original paper, the old “shotgun marriage” scenario, where
society expected men to “promise marriage in the event of a pregnancy,”
depended on a sense of inherent obligation. But if any unintended pregnancy
could be ended by the free choice of the woman, then the male could reasonably
deny the existence of any definite obligation on his part.
“By making the birth of the child
the physical choice of the mother,” Akerlof and Yellen concluded, “the sexual
revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.”
This shift, they suggested, could not be undone; any social conservatism
appears in their analysis as a probably futile effort to “turn the
technological clock backwards.” But the new female freedom came at a cost to
women who wanted fidelity and children and didn’t want to have abortions; for
them, the post-sexual revolution world was less supportive, its norms now reset
to work against expectations of monogamy, commitment and support.
Men could lose out in this new
culture as well. Just as the woman who wants commitment sees her position
weakened when abortion is a normal and expected alternative, so does the man
who wants involvement, obligation, an expectation he can rise to meet — and who
is told instead, in every case where the woman’s choice is for abortion, to
simply forget any paternal pang or instinct, to detach entirely from the life
he cocreated. The man confronted by what in a different culture would be the
most important obligation of his life is told in ours that it’s at most an
economic burden, a matter of child-support payments — and if he’s lucky and she
chooses to get an abortion, it won’t be even that.
Extend this imaginative analysis
still further, and you can see that the right to abortion creates not just new
social incentives that disfavor commitment and paternal obligation but also a
kind of moral and spiritual alienation between the sexes. The most
transformative thing that men and women do together becomes instead a ground of
separation. The man’s right to avoid marital obligation separates the pregnant
woman from either him, her unborn child or both. The woman’s right to end the
pregnancy separates the man who doesn’t want to see it ended from what would
otherwise be the most important relationship imaginable. And downstream from
this alienation lies the culture we experience today, in which not just
marriage rates but also relationships and sex itself are in decline, in which
people have fewer children overall and fewer than they say they want, and also
have more of them outside of wedlock than in the past.
All of this carries a set of
socioeconomic costs to set against the benefits invoked by the Yellen of 2022.
Yes, individual by individual, women who obtain abortion in a pro-choice
society can improve their own financial picture or educational prospects; so
can the man who avoids paternal obligations through the woman’s right to choose.
But male and female choices overall, the
cultural matrix that determines their prospects for stable relationships,
romantic happiness and a productive adulthood, may still be shaped for the
worse by a society that defaults so often to abortion.
If that shaping influence yields
fewer marriages and fewer two-parent households, it will place much more
financial stress on women who choose to become mothers.
If it yields more children growing
up without a father, and especially more sons growing up with absent dads — as
Richard Reeves’s recent book, “Of Boys and Men,” points out, boys seem to fare
particularly poorly in those circumstances — then it will impose
multigenerational costs on those kids’ economic prospects.
And if it yields fewer children in the long run, not just
because of abortion itself but because the sexes are failing to pair off, then
that will be a permanent drag on prosperity and growth.
One can counter that if abortion is
a fundamental liberty, a requirement of equality, none of this should matter.
Any cost to prosperity and social stability is trumped by the necessity of
emancipating women, and we just have to accept that we’re still groping our way
toward a stable alternative to the patriarchal order we rightly overthrew (or
haven’t finished overthrowing).
But that’s just the pro-choice
version of the Walther argument — that sometimes justice requires accepting
destabilization and disorder — and it should be acknowledged as such, rather
than dressed up as a defense of bourgeois prosperity and growth.
A subtler rejoinder might point out
that nothing is simple here. Just as the original sexual revolution was a
multi-factorial affair, the current alienation of the sexes can’t just be about
abortion; it’s shaped by everything from globalization’s effect on blue-collar
male wages to the internet’s effect on current young-adult social lives. The
Yellen-Akerlof-Katz paper may have been a plausible analysis, but it didn’t
claim to measure an exact “Roe v. Wade” effect, separate from all other forces
shaping the modern socioeconomic landscape. And as Yellen and Akerlof argued in
drawing pro-choice conclusions, you can’t assume that such an effect could be
reversed just by reversing abortion policy; we don’t know how much of the shift
was driven by the birth control pill alone, or what effect anti-abortion laws
would have once the cultural transition they describe has taken place.
But you also can’t just assume that
our society’s post-1960s path is inevitable and impossible to redirect, that
we’re on the only road an economically advanced society can ever take. You
can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should
be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in
mating and marriage and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be
considered as part of the debate.
Here the pro-life cause’s very
utopianism, its goal of a society for which no definite model yet exists, can
be an analytic asset, while the practiced realism of the pro-choice side can
double as excuse making for the unhappy aspects of the status quo. If you sit
fully inside the dominant paradigms of our society, then abortion seems like it
must be good for the economy — the woman who gets an abortion has more time and
money for her own education, the unborn child might have been poor and costly to
the welfare state, and so on.
But step outside those frameworks,
try to look at the larger direction of the developed world — even try to
imagine yourself passing the judgments of capital-H History on our society from
a vantage point a few centuries hence.
What you might see from this perspective is a world where
economic growth has decelerated under the rule of social liberalism, and
various forms of stagnation have set in. A world clearly shadowed by the
effects of family breakdown and social atomization, with loneliness and despair
stalking young and old alike. A rich world whose chief economic problem over
the next few generations is population aging, population decline, childless
cities and empty hinterlands and a vast inverted demographic pyramid on the
shoulders of the young.
And then you would also see, from
this arc-of-history vantage point, the most influential voices in our aging,
unhappy, stagnation-shadowed society — the most educated and impassioned and
articulate, the most self-consciously devoted to the idea of progress —
committing and recommitting themselves to the view that nothing is so important
as to continue ensuring that hundreds of thousands of unborn lives can be ended
in utero every year.
I conclude this series with an
appeal to readers who are thus committed. Giving due weight to all the reasons
that you hold so firmly to this principle, I beseech you to consider that you
are making a mistake."
