Janet Yellen is right about costs of overturning Roe

You wouldn’t think a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee would turn into a debate over abortion rights. But overturning Roe vs Wade would have real costs for the US economy, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was entirely correct to note them in a tense and revealing exchange with Senator Tim Scott.
Limiting or eliminating access abortion “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” Yellen said. Scott replied that framing abortion rights around women’s labor force participation and economic stability “seems harsh and callous.”
“This is not harsh. This is the truth,” responded Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve. “Denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.”
“I’ll just say that as a guy raised by a Black woman in abject poverty, I am thankful to be here as a United States senator,” Scott said.
Scott misses the point. Yellen isn’t saying he shouldn’t be alive. She’s not saying that poor women don’t deserve to have children. She’s pointing out that limiting access to abortion will primarily affect poor and vulnerable women and women of color, who will no longer have the autonomy to make reproductive choices based on whether they can afford it.
And that’s in no small part because conservative lawmakers have tended to oppose policies that would support women when they do have children, such as subsidies for child care or universal paid family and medical leave. They also voted against the Build Back Better bill, which included family and medical leave as well as a permanent expansion of the child tax credit.
If you ban abortions, says Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College, “you will see more affluent women travel to obtain and the poorest of poor women unable to attain them.” As a result, she says, there could be upwards of 75,000 unplanned births in the year following a reversal of Roe. Myers’s calculation is based in part on where abortion providers are located and which states are likely to ban or limit abortion. She says about half of US women of reproductive age live in counties where average travel distances to a provider will increase from 33 miles to 282 miles. Of the 25% of women who won’t be able to travel, about 75% will give birth as a result.
She asks a question: “Once we determine that limiting abortion access is going to cause a subset of women — primarily poor and vulnerable ones — to become mothers when they did not feel prepared to do so, then what happens next?” When someone has a baby, they aren’t paid to take time off to care for it. The US is only rich country in the world without any form of national paid leave, leaving it up to employers and states. Of the 26 states that the Guttmacher Institute says are certain or likely to ban abortion, none offers paid family leave. According to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 8% of low-wage workers have access to some form of paid leave.
The result is that one in four women in the US returns to works within two weeks after childbirth — despite the recommendation of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that they take off at least six weeks. The expense of raising children is a strain on low-income families. As former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Jacob Lew point out, 35 million families were receiving up to $300 under a pandemic-era expanded child tax credit, keeping roughly 3.7 million children out of poverty. But that assistance expired in December, causing child poverty to rise 41%.

—Bloomberg