I’ve written extensively in this column about anti-poverty policy. I’ve underscored the importance of minimum wages, work supports including child care and wage subsidies, SNAP (food stamps), housing and health care. I’ve often stressed the critical role for criminal justice reform. I never shut up about the benefits of full employment.
But I’ve never said a word about reproductive rights.
I have long supported such rights. And I’ve long recognized the decline in teenage pregnancy, particularly among poor girls, as an important advance for social policy (see Belle Sawhill’s work on access to contraception and its positive impacts on child/parent outcomes). But I’ve failed to connect the dots between access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion, and economic security.
Thankfully, those dots are compellingly connected in this report from last year, “Two Sides of the Same Coin, Integrating Economic and Reproductive Justice.” If you’re thinking the connection should be obvious, I agree. Having a child is much more than an economic event, but it’s also very much that, invoking significant direct costs and opportunity costs (and benefits too, of course). Thus, the inability to control such costs due to lack of access to reproductive health care is a potentially poverty-inducing problem for low-income women and their families (and 69 percent of those who seek abortions are low-income). Conversely, increasing use of the birth control pill, for example, has been found to significantly reduce the gender pay gap.