Abortion is an Economic Issue. Abortion is a Worker's Rights Issue

What men who demand Dems "focus on economic issues" miss about reproductive rights.

Image via Wiki Commons.

Bernie Sanders has some advice for Democrats: Quit focusing so much on abortion rights, and instead talk about the economy.

In an op/ed published in the Guardian headlined “Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake,” Sanders writes that he is “alarmed to hear the advice that many Democratic candidates are getting from establishment consultants and directors of well-funded Super Pacs that the closing argument of Democrats should focus only on abortion.” He continues:

This country has, for decades, faced structural economic crises that have caused the decline of the American middle class. Now is the time for Democrats to take the fight to the reactionary Republican party and expose their anti-worker views on the most important issues facing ordinary Americans. That is both the right thing to do from a policy perspective and good politics.

Indeed. And for women, almost nothing else determines your economic and professional future as significantly and directly as decisions about when and whether to have children.

Restricting reproductive rights and stigmatizing abortion are structural economic issues. Restricting reproductive and stigmatizing abortion keeps women poor and consigns children to poverty, too.

Also: The problem Bernie says is happening isn’t happening. No Democrat in the country is running on abortion alone. There is no cabal of “establishment consultants” and elite Super Pac directors telling Democrats “only talk about abortion and nothing else.” The president of the United States can barely get himself to utter the word “abortion.” The idea that abortion is a winning strategy is very, very new and remains very, very contested — especially by the same established politicians and advisors who have for years been telling Democrats to avoid the A-word.

Restricting reproductive rights is a structural economic issue.

So if the problem Bernie is railing against isn’t actually happening, what is it he (and many of his supporters and many members of the hated Democratic establishment) are upset about?

What is happening is that, finally, some Democrats are going on the offensive when it comes to abortion rights. No Democrat is running on abortion alone, but many Democrats are correctly assessing that abortion is a winning issue, and they should hammer the fact that their Republican opponents want to strip abortion rights from American women, throw doctors in jail, and roll back a century of feminist progress — and in doing so, put all pregnant people at risk. There remain some folks in the Democratic big tent who find this focus on reproductive rights — on women — to be intolerable. They see it as narrow and a little silly, as though emphasizing reproductive rights is focusing on some small interest group, rather than the well being and financial solvency of American families. Bernie, who I like and whose policies I overwhelmingly agree with, is unfortunately not unique among progressive men in his assumption that abortion is a fringe issue, that the working class is largely white and male, and that groups demanding to be heard have some nefarious anti-worker agenda. Why else say that your campaign is taking on not just Wall Street, but the “political establishment,” including groups like Planned Parenthood?

The simple fact of the matter is that reproductive rights are essential for ending poverty. Reproductive rights are essential for women’s workplace participation, for women’s financial stability, for healthy women, and for healthy children.

We know that when women have children, their wages fall, and that wages fall for each subsequent child a woman has. And that isn’t simply an outcome of the extra time demands of having a child at home — when men have children, their wages rise. And this is an issue that impacts working-class women most acutely: They suffer the biggest wage penalties for having children.

Working class and poor women are also much more likely to get pregnant unintentionally than wealthier women. And they are less likely than affluent and highly-educated women to end a pregnancy that is unintended. Some of this is about access: Abortion is now much more likely to be outlawed, and has for years been more limited, in the states with the highest poverty rates that offer the least support for women, children, and families. And some of it is about culture: More affluent and highly-educated women are not only more likely to live in a place where abortion is legally protected, but are also more likely to live in communities where abortion is more culturally acceptable, and are more likely to hold liberal, pro-choice views.

Affluent and highly-educated women, in other words, are often able to maintain their financial stability and stay on an upward trajectory because they are far less likely than working class women to get pregnant when they don’t want to be, and more likely have abortions when their pregnancies are mistimed, in part because of policy but in part because of conservative culture. And when women have unintended pregnancies that result in births they would have preferred to delay, that keeps poor women in poverty; it keeps working-class women from getting a leg up and out of financial precarity.

We know that, around the world, entire economies benefit when women are educated, work for pay, and can be equal economic players — GDPs grow, poverty decreases, life expectancy rises, infant deaths decline. And we know that women simply cannot reach their full potential if they cannot fully control their bodies, and most especially the number and spacing of their children. Of course the laundry list of progressive desires is just as important as abortion rights, including making the rich pay their fair share in taxes and expanding the social safety net and welfare state so that fewer people struggle.

But the right to end a pregnancy — the right to decide what happens within the borders of your own skin — is also among the most fundamental rights any human being can have.

No amount of support for mothers or taxes on billionaires will change the fact that if a woman cannot control her body, she cannot control her life.

xx Jill