Opinion – Ross Douthat: Does American Society Need Abortion?

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing shortly after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that restricting abortion rights “would have very damaging effects on the economy.”

Women who were denied the right to an abortion would miss out on educational opportunities and would be “more likely to live in poverty” or “in need of public assistance”. And this would have consequences for their children, who would then “grow up in poverty and do worse in life”.

Yellen’s comments offer a good place to start the final essay in my series, breaking down the main arguments about abortion rights that have circulated since the Dobbs decision. The first two columns focused on physical and psychological issues, discussions of the personal burdens borne by women asked to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

This one will focus more on economic and sociological issues, and particularly on the belief that crucial elements of our current American way of life – economic prosperity, women’s opportunity, social stability – depend on the ready availability of abortion.

This thesis has several points in its favor. The first is the general reality that while many other developed countries have abortion laws that are somewhat more restrictive than more liberal states in the United States, almost no country has the comprehensive bans sought by the anti-abortion movement, the kind that try to limit abortion. procedure to the most exceptional or dangerous situations. In general, the policies of prosperity, modernity and abortion rights appear as a package.

There are notable exceptions – Ireland before 2018, Chile today, Poland – but in general the goals of the anti-abortion movement are revolutionary, even utopian, by the standards of the developed world after the 1960s. always appropriate when someone’s proposed system doesn’t have many existing models and the world we know tends in the other direction.

Then there is the specific evidence that the use of abortion may be associated with better socioeconomic outcomes for some women. In the last column of this series, I mentioned the Turnaway Study, an investigation that compares the lives of women who are denied abortions with similarly situated women who obtain them, arguing that their evidence does not necessarily support the simple picture of abortion rights that is often placed.

But this study reinforces Yellen’s economic claims, showing that women who are refused abortion face subsequent socioeconomic hardship relative to women who obtain it. So if you simply generalize from these individual results to the societal level, you would expect an anti-abortion society to be a little poorer and more stratified.

Indeed, even staunch opponents of abortion sometimes admit that this may be the case. In an essay in the New York Times, Matthew Walther argued that opponents of the practice needed to be prepared for the reality that “an abortion-free America” ​​could very well “mean more single mothers and more births to teen mothers, greater pressure on Medicaid and other welfare programs, higher crime rates, a less dynamic and flexible workforce, an increase in carbon emissions, lower student test scores, and God knows what else.”

The principle that one should not kill an unborn child, he argued, will necessarily upset a society built on the denial of the right to life, and therefore, opponents of abortion 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 recognition that it seeks a genuinely different society, as well as a different set of laws.

At the same time, however, it concedes a lot to Yellen’s worldview to analyze abortion as an economic benefit. And one reason to believe this comes from Yellen’s own work. In 1996, she and her husband, George Akerlof, joined economist Michael Katz in a paper entitled “An Analysis of Out-of-Wed Parenting in the US.” They tried to explain what seemed like a conundrum: in a world where birth control strategies have improved significantly, with contraception available and abortion legal, why are so many women having children out of wedlock?

Raising children alone is difficult, and single motherhood imposes substantial economic burdens, so you’d think that by giving women more options when carrying their pregnancies to term, more women would choose to do so with the child’s father married and present. Instead, the opposite was happening, with post-1960s and post-Roe America seeing an unprecedented rise in the proportion of children born out of wedlock – a rise that continued for more than a decade after 1996, before finally stabilizing at about 40% of all births, compared to 5% in 1960 and 10% in 1970.

Part of the explanation the article proposed was that there had been a fundamental shift in the reciprocal obligations of men and women. A system in which sex could be separated from fertility, with abortion guaranteed to anyone who wanted it, made it much more difficult for women who wanted commitment and children to make long-term demands of men who wanted to have sex with them.

As Yellen and Akerlof wrote in a policy brief for the Brookings Institution adapted from the original paper, the old “forced marriage” scenario, in which society expected men to “promise marriage in case of pregnancy,” depended on a common sense. inherent obligation. But if any unwanted pregnancy could be terminated by the woman’s free choice, then the man could reasonably deny the existence of any definite obligation on his part.

“By making child birth the mother’s physical choice,” concluded Akerlof and Yellen, “the sexual revolution made marriage and child-rearing a social choice for the father.”

This change, they suggested, could not be undone; any social conservatism appears in his analysis as a probably futile attempt to “turn back the technological clock”.

But the new female freedom came at a cost for women who wanted fidelity and children and didn’t want abortions; for them, the post-sexual revolution world was less supportive, with norms now redefined to work against expectations of monogamy, commitment, and support.

Men can also lose out in this new culture. Just as the woman who wants commitment finds her position weakened when abortion is a normal and expected alternative, so too does the man who wants involvement, obligation, an expectation he can fulfill – and who is told instead , in all cases in which the woman opts for an abortion, simply to forget any anguish or paternal instinct, to disconnect entirely from the life he helped to create.

The man confronted with what in a different culture would be the most important obligation of his life hears, in ours, that it is at best an economic burden, a matter of paying child support – and, if he is lucky and she opts for an abortion, not even that.

It might be objected that if abortion is a fundamental freedom, a requirement of equality, none of that should matter. Any cost to prosperity and social stability is outweighed by the need to emancipate women, and we just have to accept that we are still groping our way towards a stable alternative to the patriarchal order that we have rightly overthrown (or are not quite finished overthrowing).

But this is just the abortion rights version of Walther’s argument – ​​that justice sometimes requires accepting destabilization and disorder – and it should be recognized as such, rather than disguised as a defense of bourgeois prosperity and growth.

A more subtle retort might indicate that nothing is simple here. Just as the original sexual revolution was multifactorial, the current alienation of the sexes cannot just be about abortion; it is shaped by everything from the effect of globalization on the wages of blue-collar workers to the effect of the Internet on the current social lives of young adults. The Yellen-Akerlof-Katz article may have been a plausible analysis, but it was not intended to measure an exact “Roe vs. Wade” effect, separate from all the other forces shaping the modern socioeconomic landscape. And, as Yellen and Akerlof argued when drawing conclusions favorable to abortion rights, one cannot assume that such an effect could be reversed only by reversing abortion policy; we don’t know how much of the change was brought about by the contraceptive pill alone, or what effect anti-abortion laws would have when the cultural transition they describe occurs.

But neither can it be assumed that the path after the 1960s is inevitable and impossible to redirect, that we are on the only path an economically advanced society can take. It cannot be insisted that the immediate economic benefits of terminating a pregnancy must be counted in favor of Roe v. Wade, but any of the larger negative changes in mating, marriage, and parenting associated with abortion cannot be considered part of the discussion.

Here, the very utopianism of the anti-abortion cause, its aim of a society for which a defined model does not yet exist, can be an analytical device, while the realism practiced on the abortion rights side can function as an excuse for the unfortunate aspects of the status quo. what. If you fully fit into the dominant paradigms of our society, then it seems that abortion must be good for the economy; the woman who has an abortion has more time and money for her own education, the unborn child might have been poor and expensive for the welfare state—and so on.

But step outside these frameworks, try to look in the broader direction of the developed world – even try to imagine yourself endorsing History’s capital H judgments about our society from a vantage point a few centuries from now. What can be seen from this perspective is a world in which economic growth has slowed under the rule of social liberalism and various forms of stagnation have set in. A world clearly obscured by the effects of family breakdown and social atomization, with loneliness and despair haunting young and old alike.

A rich world, whose main economic problem in the coming generations is an aging population, population decline, childless cities, empty interiors and a vast inverted demographic pyramid on the shoulders of the young.

And so you would also see, from this arc of history point of view, the most influential voices in our aging, unhappy and stagnation-shadowed society – the most educated, passionate and articulate, the most consciously dedicated to the idea of ​​progress – committing themselves to and reaffirming yourself with the view that nothing is as important as continuing to ensure that hundreds of thousands of unborn lives can be terminated in the womb every year. I conclude this series with an appeal to such committed readers. Giving due weight to all the reasons why you hold so firmly to this principle, I urge you to consider that you are making a mistake.