Taking Women’s Health Seriously
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards may have put it best at this year’s Democratic National Convention when she said that the 2012 election season has been “like a bad episode of Mad Men.” For the amount of times each candidate has uttered the word “birth control”, you would think we were still arguing about Griswold v. Connecticut. Here’s the problem: contraception is an economic issue. It affects more than just women’s personal financial viability, but also the economy of the nation as a whole. Birth control is good for our national economy, and talking about it as just a “women’s issue” fails to account for the potential benefits that easy access to birth control has on our nation as a whole.
Historically, contraception has played a substantial economic role in helping narrow the gender pay gap and placing more women in the work force. Comparing the wages of women who were in their twenties in the 1960s, when the pill became legal, against those born just ten years earlier shows substantial economic gains for women, partially thanks to the pill. A National Bureau of Economic Research study, “The Opt in Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages,” found that the pill accounted for at least 10% of women’s wage gains in the 1980s and more than 30% of their gains in the 1990s. Women’s ability to delay childbearing made job training and education more accessible, enabling them more successful participants in the labor force.
Women’s role as mothers complicates their role in the workforce, and being able to control how and when to have children contributes substantially to a woman’s economic viability. While a challenge for all mothers, the problem of balancing work and children is compounded when women don’t have access to contraception and have children before they may be ready. Because contraception gives women the ability to delay childbearing and invest in their careers, it increases their participation in the workforce. As women expand the work force, they also increase GDP. The “Gender Inequality, Growth and Global Aging” report by Goldman Sachs estimates that closing the gap between male and female workforce participation would improve the US GDP by as much as 9%. In addition, a 2011 research project from McKinsey and Company found that women can be attributed for up to 25% of GDP growth between 1970 and 2009, saying “GDP growth is driven by two factors—an expanding workforce and rising productivity. Back in the 1970s when women and a huge cohort of baby boomer men were entering the workforce, 65% of GDP growth arose from workforce expansion.”
While the ability for women to have personal, medical and economic autonomy would seem reason enough to increase access to contraception, increasing access to contraception would also remove the economic burden of paying for unintended pregnancies. A Guttmacher Institute finding shows that unintended pregnancies cost taxpayers $11 billion annually. What’s more, two-thirds of all unintended pregnancies are publically funded, and in some states it’s as much as 80% of unintended births. Investing in prevention would save enormous amounts of money later on: “Investing in publicly funded family planning to help women avoid unintended pregnancy has a proven track record: In the absence of the services provided at publicly funded family planning centers, the costs of unintended pregnancy would be 60% higher than they are today.” We invest in countless public health preventative measures, and contraception should be no different. The Brookings Institute found that every dollar spent on pregnancy prevention produced taxpayer savings of between two to six dollars. This investment is especially crucial because unintended pregnancies are disproportionately high among poor communities – women who couldn’t afford contraception on their own in the first place.
Romney has infamously promised to defund Planned Parenthood, and his campaign has been run on a generally anti-woman platform. For all his talk about fixing the fledgling Obama economy, he seems to be blatantly ignoring the economic role of Planned Parenthood and women’s health services. The same Brookings Institute research found two of the main problems contributing to unintended pregnancies were a misunderstanding of contraception and lack of access to it (both physically and economically). These two barriers could be substantially ameliorated if we continue to invest in family planning. This investment is a proven solution, and committing to it publically, by the government, would be economically beneficial to the nation as a whole: “There is strong evidence that expansions in access to publicly subsidized family planning services can affect rates of contraceptive use and unintended childbearing.”
If this election is one centered on the economy, as Romney claims it to be, women’s issues need to remain on the table. Though the Republican platform has tried to frame women’s issues as “distractions” from the real problems at hand, the truth is that women’s issues are economic issues. The GOP has struggled for a long time to garner women’s votes, and campaigning on an anti-contraception platform has not helped their cause. Women are crucial in deciding elections. In 2008, nearly 10 million more women voted than men. Contraception plays an integral role in the health of women, but also in the health of the national economy. It’s not just another “silly” social issue. It’s time to take women seriously, and stop campaigning in a way that says our interests aren’t important to the nation as a whole. Contraception is a basic right, and it’s one that women won’t forget about come November.