In post-Roe America, who is looking out for the mother?
Many Americans offered prayers of thanksgiving yesterday for the demise of the January 22, 1973 Roe v. Wade decision after 50 years. But we should also note that much of American society remains structurally committed to the support of abortion.
Decisions to abort unborn children are personal, but they emerge within particular social structures. Women with unintended pregnancies, especially when they are single, face cultural and economic pressures. They often face a catastrophic loss of relationships, as boyfriends desert them and parents sometimes shut them out. Many have immediate economic difficulties and can foresee long-term problems, as structures built on abortion availability do not accommodate those who continue their pregnancies.
Although in the long run corporations depend on more births to deliver future customers, in the short run pregnancies can reduce profits. The three Supreme dissenters from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe—Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor—followed previous Court language about “safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom” so each can “participate equally in [American] economic and social life.” Amy Matsui, Director of Income Security at the National Women’s Law Center, has emphasized how increases in the Gross National Product depend on abortion: “Unplanned births make it harder for women to work.”
From a business standpoint, the goal is to avoid loss of work time: It’s less expensive to facilitate abortions than to allow work at home, or to set aside office space for nursing rooms and baby care. Within days of the Dobbs decision, new wave corporations such as Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Starbucks, Nike, and Zillow said they would pay travel costs for employees (and even family members or partners) in pro-life states who decided to head to abortion havens. Uber offered not only travel expenses but reimbursement for any driver who (hypothetically) faces a lawsuit for transporting women to abortion centers.
Traditional companies also hopped onto the bandwagon. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs apparently decided capitalism needs abortion. Kroger and Levi Strauss said they would pay to eliminate future customers for Sugar Pops or denim. Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN, announced it would pay for abortion travel. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch in an internal memo called the Supreme Court decision a “crushing blow to reproductive rights” and said the company would respond powerfully through its content and journalism.
The federal government now stands firmly on the side of abortion. For example, the Food and Drug Administration had a longstanding requirement that abortionists giving women the abortion drug mifepristone had to do it in person. The reasons: to ensure that women did not have an ectopic pregnancy or were taking it too late in pregnancy. Possible coercion by men was another concern. But early this month the FDA said the in-person requirement is now gone, as are guidelines that prohibited retail pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS from dispensing the drug. Those two pharmacy companies have announced plans to pursue certification.
It was no surprise that numerous college presidents and professors quickly issued statements attacking the Dobbs decision. Numerous university social work programs make abortion advocacy part of their teaching, and in June the National Association of Social Workers quickly announced that it “condemns today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that medical schools include abortion training in their curricula.
In several books I’ve documented newspaper and magazine abortion advocacy. A new development is the increase in television plotlines on abortion. “Abortion Onscreen in 2022” counted sixty shows, more than in any previous years, with at least twenty portraying “barriers to access,” compared to only two in 2021.
Director of Income Security Matsui, in “Abortion Access is Critical to Economic Security,” says avoidance of abortion “increases the amount of debt 30 days or more past due by 78% [and] increases the rate of negative public records, such as bankruptcies and evictions, by 81%.” Matsui does not suggest that a lender or landlord looking at a very pregnant woman might try a little tenderness.
Marvin Olasky, now affiliated with two institutes, Discovery and Acton, is an elder in the Presbyterian Church of America and the author or co-author of more than 30 books, including The Story of Abortion in America.
Excellent article, which raises a range of cultural and “lifestyle” issues beyond abortion. America, the land of the free, has long imagined itself a “pro-choice” nation where people are free to throw off the past and be anything they wish to be. Though historians often point out how such freedom has often been restricted, they have been less willing confront the ways in which structures favor some choices over others, establish new norms which penalize deviants who choose different norms. In the realm of sex, fertility and monogamy are deviations from a norm of maximum sexual freedom without reproductive consequences; anyone who chooses such a deviation deserves what she gets. Despite lip service to child care, in a pro-choice world, anti-fertility is the norm (as the demography of the “developed” world shows). I suppose in a democracy, vox populi, vox dei. Unfortunately, the vote on these issues tends to pit consent vs. coercion, abstract rights vs. abstract moral principles. The structural model you have outlined shows that the vote is really about the issue of how we live as a society.
A really stellar example of clear and just-lively-enough prose, as well as keen bservations.
However: “Matsui does not suggest that a lender or landlord looking at a very pregnant woman might try a little tenderness.”
Not difficult to figure out why: That suggestion would go exactly nowhere. If we’re going to look at structures, we need to admit the faut is not Matsui’s (et al) for not taking a different tack, or the lender’s hard-heartedness, or the lender’s lender for not cutting him a break, and on, endlessly, up the chain.
The structures in which they and we are enmeshed are not pro- those kinds of choices.
Chris Shannon, I’m curious what you make of the fact that during the more traditional, supposedly “pro-famiy” period of US history, female employees could be fired simply for being pregnant, but it was during the 1970s–the decade that gave us Roe–that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions) was passed? Or that it was deep into the supposedly extremely-anti-family Obama period that SCOTUS–the same court that gave us Obergefell, in fact–reversed lower courts in Young v UPS, strengthening the rights of women to keep their jobs while pregnant (with the four liberal justices in the majority, in fact)? It seems to me that in some important ways it was the US up to the 1970s that operated by the rule “anyone who chooses [motherhood] deserves what she gets,” and that one of the most dramatic reversals of an employer’s power to exercise their autonomy at the expense of American families has been, in fact, a very recent–and liberal–achievement.
John,
I will go you one further. In the supposedly good ol’ days of pro-family America, a woman could get fired for getting married! My comments were not an endorsement of the good ol’ days, but a reflection on the broader issue of how “structure” works, how it establishes norms and penalizes those who deviate from them. In the old days, yes, a woman could be fired for being pregnant for the norm was that if a woman were going to have a baby she should be at home to take care of the child. I am not saying that norm is right or wrong, just that it was the norm. In our own time, the norm is the opposite. Women, like men, should orient everything in their lives toward pursuing a successful career. For both men and women, children interfere with the pursuit of that norm.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act was less about defending pregnancy than advancing the right of women to pursue maximum career opportunities free from the old pregnancy penalty. Yes, pro-choicers talk about the “right” to pregnancy and insist on the need for greater access to child care, but all within a structural framework that discourages pregnancy. This is my take on Marvin’s article. Have I misinterpreted him?
One of the great ironies of this structural problem is that godless European social democracies have far more pro-family policies than God-fearing America, but they can’t get any takers. Why is that? I suppose I am judging the “pro-family” nature of a society by its fruits, and those fruits are pretty rotten throughout most of the “developed” world. What is the point of defending pregnancy as a right and offering subsidies to promote family life when every thing else in the culture and society works against pregnancy and family life?
I was taking the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to be part of our current “structural framework,” a new norm that reverses the old norm which actually penalized pregnancy.