The Grand Illusion
There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems for pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.
Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.
But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?
This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.
In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.
LEM,
Unfortunately all the negatives you describe seem to be a feature, rather than a bug, for many of those same state legislature members who created and passed these laws. As Adam Serwer (The Atlantic) described a few years ago, “Cruelty is the point”.
One aspect that no one has addressed is insurance coverage for women. Under ACA health insurance premiums for men and women are the same. Pre-ACA women of reproductive age were charged higher premiums because they might get pregnant. Do the radical conservatives want to go back to those days?
But… because ACA premiums are the same, that means that the higher costs for women caused by effectively banning maternal health care will also fall on men.
As a single woman before ACA, I paid my own premiums, which were significantly higher than men’s premiums.
And,no, I wasn’t planning on getting pregnant.
“Do the radical conservatives want to go back to those days?”
I think they want to go back to the 1940s. Or possibly the 1840s.
Then again, given how tyranny is in vogue with them, maybe the 1740s.
They want to go back to an imagined time where everything was good like when they were in preschool. Which means they didn’t have a clue what was really going on. They still don’t have a clue about what is going on and it confuses them. They want someone they think is an adult to make their world simple again.
As one sage recently observed, the entire Republican set of policies appear to be based on the assumption that there must be an ‘out group’ whom the law binds but does not protect and an ‘in group’ whom the law protects but does not bind.
It’s good, I suppose, that I’m a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male or I’d be in a world of hurt in this country.
Basic truth of all of us who think of ourselves: before we think of other, while we think of others, and after we think of others.
It seems that our ideology, theological or political, matters not.