The GOP Wages Class War Against Women

Abortion bans widen the gap between haves and have-nots.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

As researchers continue to gather data about reality in post-Dobbs America, two parallel stories seem to be emerging: Thousands of pregnant women in conservative states have been trapped, unable to end pregnancies they do not want to carry; and also, more women are getting abortions than before, including many who likely wouldn’t have had abortions before the Dobbs ruling and the subsequent state abortion bans it allowed.

Abortion rates ticked up slightly because, post-Dobbs, many progressive states made abortions easier to access, and tons of money flooded into groups that help women afford abortions. There is also the fact that during the Covid pandemic, telemedicine became the go-to for care that didn’t have to happen in person, and that extended to abortion pills, which are safely taken at home. That telemedicine access to abortion has remained widely in place, at least where abortion is legal.

And abortion rates have plummeted in states that criminalize abortion, for obvious reasons, while birth rates in those states have increased.

This isn’t a conservative war on abortion. This is a conservative war on poor women — and particularly poor women in red states. And it seems almost guaranteed to cleave open existing inequalities, pushing poor women who have the bad luck to live in Republican-run states even further down the ladder.

There is a stunning gap between outcomes for women and children in conservative versus liberal states, and abortion bans have been put into place largely in states where women and children were already the worst off: Where mothers and babies were the most likely to die; where the most children live in poverty; where the fewest women are insured; where teenage girls are the most likely to become mothers; where the minimum wage sits at the federal floor. These bans will only exacerbate those preexisting dynamics. Despite the anti-abortion movement branding itself as “pro-life” and talking a big game about supporting vulnerable women and babies in our new post-Roe America, that hasn’t happened. Conservative states have not raised wages, or instituted universal childcare, or passed paid leave, or expanded their health insurance rolls. They have, however, found time to pass various abortion bans with various penalties and few exceptions.

Abortion bans hurt all women. We’ve seen the evidence of this from the women with wanted pregnancies who go to the hospital miscarrying and are told to go home until they’re closer to dying of an infection. And any woman who lives in a nation with misogynist laws that don’t allow her to decide what happens with her own internal organs is a woman who is not free. But by the numbers, abortion bans mostly hurt poor women who live deep in conservative states. Missouri, for example, didn’t see the same birthrate increase, probably even though its only abortion clinic shut down, that clinic was two miles from another just over the Illinois border — not much harder for women to get to. Mississippi and Texas, by contrast, saw a significant jumps in post-Dobbs birthrates. Women in Mississippi have to drive an average of 240 miles to get to an abortion clinic. For women in Texas, it’s 453 miles.

When poor women cannot end pregnancies, the downstream effects are devastating. The average woman who seeks an abortion in the US is a poor and relatively young mother. She is disproportionately likely to be Black or Latina. And like any woman who seeks an abortion, she understands the costs of not having one — of the dreams dissolved, the household math made impossible, the balance of her life upended.

For poor women, though, that balance is particularly delicate, and that household math particularly tight. Forcing women to have children against their will often keeps them in poverty, or pushes them into it. It curtails opportunities for their existing children, the ones they may no longer be able to adequately support (financially and emotionally) when another is added. It keeps women in bad situations: In crummy jobs, in hazardous apartments, with abusive men.

Republican politicians and abortion opponents know this. Maybe it’s not exactly their goal — keeping women dependent on men, not the government, seems to be of greater interest. But they understand that making women and children poorer is the outcome of abortion bans, and they’re fine with it. And when you fold that reality into the fact that so much of the GOP agenda is about rhetorical support for the white working class coupled with material deprivation for all but the wealthiest, well — you do start to wonder where knowledge bleeds into intent.

The future into which we are headed looks like this: Women in progressive states who generally make more money, are insured no matter their income, live longer and healthier lives, almost always see their children grow into adulthood, and can plan their families. And women in conservative states who make less, are less likely to be insured, live shorter and sicker lives, are less likely to see their babies survive infancy and more likely to see their kids die from gun violence or suicide or drugs, and who, if they are poor, have relatively little ability to decide whether to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term. And within those conservative states, women with means — or women attached to men with means — will be largely unscathed by the cruel policies of their state. Wealthier women in liberal states will also be better off than poorer women. But the average woman in a conservative state will be worse off than the average woman in a liberal one — and a poor woman in a conservative state will be far, far worse off than a poor woman in a liberal one.

This is a political choice. And from Republicans, it’s a choice to engage in a misogynist war on the poor.

xx Jill