As the Dobbs v. Jackson decision looms and its consequences are feared yet not entirely known, the justifications made by the Supreme Court have become major points of contention in public discourse. While not as obvious as medicine or political science, economics – particularly socioeconomics – is an intrinsic facet of abortion that counters fundamental claims in the Dobbs decision. A socioeconomic view of the aftermath of Dobbs will pick up on existing and novel trends that would otherwise be overlooked when exclusively observing abortion medically or politically.
To understand the value of a socioeconomic perspective, the nature of the Court’s justifications must be understood. The Court pushed to unratify abortion as a constitutional right based on five factors that range in credibility. For example, the workability factor states that, as per Planned Parenthood v. Casey, consistently and predictably differentiating between a permissible and unconstitutional abortion restriction proved to be impossible. This empirically holds: Appellate courts have continually disagreed on the legality of parental notification rules, medical procedures, and other matters. On the other hand, the Court sees the broad impact of Roe v. Wade and Casey as an undue authority, encroaching on “unrelated legal doctrines.” While the Court argues this encroachment violates its standards of practice, there are various counterarguments to be made, such as the intersectionality of abortion. Roe and Casey may have adopted a broad authority because they have clear applications beyond the medical context. Alas, defining encroachment and validating its presence in Roe and Casey is not as clear as the conflicts among the appellate courts.
The fifth factor, reliance, is perhaps the least credible and most contentious. The following quotation highlights the weakest point of this factor – “the alleged inability to measure the impact of abortion rights.” The quotation originates from a larger section of the Court’s majority opinion on reliance interests in Casey. Reliance is legally defined as a person’s dependency on the statements or actions of another person or entity. The controlling opinion in Casey, however, could not assess reliance in its conventional sense, instead perceiving it more abstractly: the opinion states that intimate decisions regarding relationships, personal views, and societal belonging have been made based on the availability of abortion; that control over reproductive processes has provided socioeconomic equality for women. On reliance interests in Dobbs, the Court refutes:
When a concrete reliance interest is asserted, courts are equipped to evaluate the claim, but assessing the novel and intangible form of reliance endorsed by the Casey plurality is another matter. That form of reliance depends on an empirical question that is hard for anyone – and in particular, for a court -to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who delivered the majority opinion, says later that the Casey decision was an overstep of the Court’s constitutionally afforded powers and was attempting to impose its social and economic beliefs onto legislative bodies.
Disregarding the non-inclusive use of “women” throughout the opinion, the claimed difficulty in assessing the social impacts of abortion access comes off as flagrant ignorance of the extensive body of literature that suggests otherwise. Indeed, the academic literature on the right to abortion is diverse in discipline. One article explores sexism as an explanation for political differences in abortion support – another rethinks the definition of abortion and its permissibility primarily through Islamic law. Others examine abortion as scholars of media studies, bioethics, computer science, international politics, and socioeconomics.
While not obvious, analyzing the impacts of abortion socioeconomically is not novel. The Brookings Institution concurs in a report on the effect of abortion access on women’s lives: decades of economics research show a clear, causal link between abortion access and education, earnings, careers, and life outcomes for the children of birthing parents. The research observes economics as the study of human decisions beyond the paltry perspective of markets and resource scarcity; then, socioeconomics is the study of people’s decisions in shaping and being shaped by social processes. As exemplified by the deliberation on reliance interests, abortion concerns decisions beyond health needs and legal intricacies. It is a matter of forming long-term relationships and starting new lives; conferring socioeconomic equality and independence for demographics that have been historically suppressed in this regard – constructing environments for individuals, families, and communities to support their livelihoods independently. An economic perspective expands analysis through the literature, tools, and models of the discipline, providing a more holistic view of decisions and impacts related to abortion, post-Dobbs especially.
The current state of the abortion macroeconomy is fundamental in this analysis. Now out of the domain of the federal government, abortion rights are delegated to the states as per the Tenth Amendment. The New York Times shows that about half of the U.S. have, or are expected to, enact abortion bans or other gestational limits. Some states are in a gray area as abortion remains legal in some states either because bans have been blocked or because a ban is coming. Despite the uncertainty in legislation, this split provides grounds for a more robust analysis. Changes will have a clear and common cause (Dobbs) which allows for impacts to be better understood, analyzed, and generalized for making predictions.
Given the broad, social implications of the issue at hand, it is likely that many impacts of abortion bans will only take place over the long-term. As such, projections are necessary to track the impact of these bans. While some impacts may be entirely new phenomena (thus difficult to predict), others will almost certainly play out, particularly as trends reverse. These include the increase in education, labor force participation, occupational prestige, and earnings for women and especially Black women following abortion legalization – generational improvements in long-term outcomes for children in terms of poverty and educational attainment; and more.
One impact specific to Missouri is a pregnant person’s virtual inability to get divorced. According to the Revised Statutes of Missouri, Statute 452.310 (5) requires the pregnancy status of a “wife” to be included in a divorce petition. While temporary orders can be issued for matters such as property, Missouri judges typically choose not to finalize a divorce until birth or a pregnancy-ending event (e.g., miscarriage). To be clear, there are no laws that strictly prohibit a divorce from being finalized given these conditions, but that fact is arguably worse: it is then a matter of shifting sentiments among judges rather than a simple policy change. With current bureaucratic processes in mind, this delay initially almost seems justified. Obviously, a child needs to exist for custody to be provisioned, hence the need to wait for the full pregnancy to see if there will be a child at all. Additionally, the divorce petition requires the Social Security number of all parties involved, including each child. Other matters concern the child’s birthday, the school they attend, and prospective medical needs. But is it necessary for a judge to delay the entire proceeding for these matters when child custody can already be modified post-divorce in Missouri? This matter is further complicated by the fact that Missouri has a full ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest following Dobbs. In essence, pregnant people in Missouri are barred from getting divorced so long as they are carrying the child, all because of the apparatus of policies that allow judges to justify delaying the process.
An instance of this situation has already been reported by the Riverfront Times about Danielle Drake, an attorney based in the Lake of the Ozarks (Missouri). After finding out her husband was having an affair, she filed for divorce but found out she was pregnant soon after. As a family attorney, Drake knew she had to file an amended petition and knew how her pregnancy would affect the divorce proceedings. Drake’s situation seems to be a first following Dobbs, but it certainly won’t be the last.
Given that divorce can give way to benefits such as greater personal happiness and better parent-child relationships, it is possible that divorces restricted by one partner’s pregnancy status in states with abortion bans will reverse these benefits. Improving parent-child relationships, for example, may give way to a parenting style similar to Annette Lareau’s concept of concerted cultivation that allows children to have better interactions with institutions, awareness of their talents and skills, and more, leading to improved socioeconomic outcomes for them. As such, restrictive petitioning paired with reduced or no access to abortions could worsen parent-child relationships, gravely reinforcing single-parenthood as a determinant of a child’s future wages, education attainment, and health outcomes.
Regardless of the range of views on abortion, socioeconomic research has consistently shown abortion is directly linked to broad improvements in the lives of birthing parents, divorced or otherwise, especially for non-white individuals. The choice of whether, when, and the circumstances under which an adult chooses to birth a child is what allows them to become more educated, earn more, and shape the lives of their children for the better. By claiming the social impacts of abortion to be difficult to measure, Justice Alito and his concurrents reject the decades of evidence proving otherwise. It has become imperative, now more than ever, for this evidence to be brought to greater attention and for the aftermath of the Dobbs decision to be critically analyzed as a socioeconomic matter.