How the latest wave of abortion bans could deepen the wealth gap and make inequality worse
By Jennifer Alsever
At least 13 states have banned most abortions in the nine months following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.
Last week, the controversy heated up when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new abortion ban that will prohibit women in his state from ending a pregnancy after six weeks, unless the mother is at serious risk or a fatal fetal abnormality is detected. And on Thursday, an anti-abortion group urged former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump to endorse a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy—then blasted him when he said states should make those decisions.
But a 10-year longitudinal study found that denying abortion to women creates economic hardship and insecurity that lasts a long time. Even years later, women who were denied the procedure were more likely to not have enough money for food, housing, and transportation, and they were more likely to have lower credit scores and more debt, evictions, and bankruptcy.
The Turnaway Study followed 1,000 women for up to five years each to determine the consequences of having or being denied an abortion. Five years later, those who were denied abortions were more likely to be single mothers, raising the child alone without family members or male partners, compared to women who received an abortion. The amount of child support was negligible following birth.
“I’m extremely worried that these bans increase the economic disparities between groups of people that make the poor poorer—and that includes kids,” says lead researcher Diana Greene Foster, a demographer at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of the book The Turnaway Project: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion.
Fast Company reached out to a number of anti-abortion organizations for comment on the Turnaway Study, but they either did not respond or were not available for comment. Abortion opponents in the past have argued that government funding of abortions encourages those who can’t afford them to seek them out.
Nobody knows how many unwanted pregnancies will be carried to term because of the abortion bans. But research and policy analyst group Guttmacher Institute counted 862,000 abortions in 2017, before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Low-income people have higher rates of seeking abortion, and this same group will have great difficulty circumventing their state laws. Those with the most resources—money, a car, childcare, and ability to take time off of work—may travel hundreds of miles to find legal services in other states. Others with internet access, a credit card, and knowledge of resources like Plan C can order medication abortion pills online.
“But those without those resources will be at the greatest risk of the worst health and economic outcomes,” Foster says.
The dystopian future is now
Already, the wealth gap is widening. An estimated $42 trillion in new wealth was created in the two years following the 2020 pandemic, and two-thirds of that went to the richest 1%. Meanwhile, 37.9 million people live in poverty and a third of them are single mothers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Over the past 50 years, economic researchers have chalked up the nation’s growing inequality to three key shifts: tax codes that favor the rich; fluctuations in the job market, where technological advancements and dependence on imported goods mean fewer high-paying jobs for low-skilled workers in manufacturing; and a widening gap in marriage rates between college-educated people and their high-school-educated counterparts that translated into more single-parent households being dependent on low-paid jobs.
The reality, however, is that single motherhood is not a reason we have unusually high poverty in the U.S. compared with other rich democracies, says David Brady, research professor of inequality and social policy at the University of California, Riverside.
“Most rich democracies have a similar amount of single motherhood. We just penalize single mothers very, very severely,” Brady says, noting the recent discontinuation of the federal child tax credit. “So they are economically disadvantaged, but they’re disadvantaged not because there’s something inherent about single motherhood; it’s just that we don’t provide support for mothers and children.”
In fact, some of the states with new abortion bans have cities with higher percentages of single mothers who already struggle financially. Miami, for instance, ranks fifth on a list of the worst places for single mothers economically: 62.5% of them have income below the poverty line, according to a recent analysis by SmartAsset.
The analysis looked at the 50 largest U.S. cities to find where single mothers struggle the most financially. In half of the cities analyzed, the median household income for single mothers decreased from 2014 to 2019. The city with the largest percentage decrease was Austin, which dropped 21.9%. Comparatively, Seattle had the largest percentage increase: 69.4%, with median income for single mothers rising from $41,134 to $69,663.
Children could pay the biggest price
Five of the nine states that have banned all abortions rank among the 10 worst states for overall child well-being (ranks of 41 through 50), according to the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research organization. In 10 of the 13 states with abortion bans, at least one-fifth or more of children live in poverty. Among these 13 states, as many as 13% to 27% of households with children often didn’t have enough food to eat in the week prior, according to the July Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. One-fifth of households with children in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas were experiencing food insecurity.
Money is one of the biggest drivers behind women seeking an abortion, according to the Turnaway Study. At least 40% said they were not financially prepared for a pregnancy, and at least 36% said it wasn’t the right time for a pregnancy. Another third of the women said that they needed to focus on other children, and 19% said they were not emotionally prepared to have a baby.
Thirty-one percent of the women sought an abortion because they had partner-related issues. In fact, the study found that those women denied an abortion were far more likely to stay with a violent partner than those who received abortions.
A lot of the women said they still wanted to have kids, Foster says. “They just want to have [kids] with the right person with the right financial security with the right job and housing,” she says. “So when people can’t get the abortion they want, they end up being less likely to have those better circumstances.”
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