“We’re still facing a shortage of child-care workers in the U.S., and we still don’t have a federal paid parental leave program that would extend to all women regardless of their job,” she explains. “So if you’re forced to have a child, you can’t go to work and you don’t have access to child care, how would you have money to live?”
Women able to access an abortion were more likely to hold a full-time job than those denied the procedure, research from the National Library of Medicine shows.
Restricting access to safe, legal abortions can also raise new barriers for women to obtain a post-secondary degree. That can lead to increased college dropout rates, which can limit career prospects.
“All of the advances women have made in entering competitive fields like law, politics and business, going to graduate programs or additional years of schooling … that’s all going to be severely impacted,” Joffe says.
In a research paper published last year, Kelly Jones, an economics professor at American University, found that a total elimination of abortion access would reduce women’s college degree attainment by 5.6%. Access to abortions, however, increased the likelihood that young women who became pregnant would finish college by about 20%.
Without federal protections for abortion, Ma’at warns, the pay gap between men and women could widen and women’s lifetime earnings could diminish. As a result, pregnant women who aren’t able to get an abortion will fall into lower-paid, part-time jobs, Ma’at predicts.
Women in states with restrictive abortion laws were less likely to move into higher-paid occupations, a 2019 report from economist Kate Bahn and other professors found.
Meanwhile, if existing abortion restrictions disappeared, women across the U.S. would make about $1,600 more annually, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates.
It’s too soon to tell what the economic fallout from the court’s decision will be months, or even years, from now. But Ma’at fears the worst: “Women are going to be suffering needlessly because they’re having babies they didn’t choose to have or can’t afford.”
Share your thoughts with us at askmakeit@cnbc.com
