- Tracy Young said she couldn't be a CEO and a mother without reproductive rights.
- Deciding if and when to have children impacts women's ability to be in the workforce.
- And birth control and abortion access play key roles in women's economic success.
It might be common sense to many women, but Tracy Young decided to say it out loud.
"As both a mother and CEO of two companies, I've experienced firsthand how crucial reproductive rights have been to my journey," she wrote in a post on LinkedIn last month.
Young, who studied construction engineering, has cofounded and served as the CEO of two startups: Plan Grid, a construction software company, and TigerEye, an AI analyst for go-to-market teams.
"It's surprising to me that in 2024, these are the conversations we are having, and part of the reason why I wrote that essay is because there's so much debate," Young told Business Insider. "I can guarantee you that I would not have been able to see through this journey of being a founder and CEO had it not been for the reproductive rights I was given."
Young's story highlights what's at risk for women who don't have access to reproductive care, and how the issue can impact not only women in the workplace but the economy at large.
Things like birth control to abortion access have been "game changers" for women's ability to participate in the workforce, said Alina Salganicoff, the senior vice president and director of the Women's Health Policy Program at KFF, a health policy research organization.
"Being able to control whether and when you have a child makes a huge difference in your life, your personal life, as well as the professional options and the education that you can pursue," Salganicoff told BI.
The issue is now front and center two weeks from a presidential election. Several states will have abortion access on the ballot.
It's largely been a winning issue for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal legalization of abortion. Even states that typically lean conservative have seen votes in favor of legalizing abortion.
How reproductive care helped Young's career
Young knew that she wanted to be a parent, but the timing wasn't right when she was in college, working on a construction site, or building a company, she said.
"Birth control helped me time pregnancy for when I was ready," Young said. "When I was building a startup for the first time and leading it as CEO for the first time, doing the biggest job I've ever done before, it was just not the right time for me."
Young and her husband had their first child in 2018, after Young said she had "matured as a CEO and as a leader."
"I just felt more competent," she said. "At that point, it felt right."
Access to reproductive healthcare made the difference again for Young when she experienced a miscarriage at work during a subsequent pregnancy. Young said her doctors in California gave her misoprostol, one of two common drugs doctors use to manage abortions or miscarriages. She also had a surgical procedure.
"There was no hesitation for the doctors to give me the treatment that they knew I needed," Young said. "Because of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, many states now have heavy restrictions on prescribing the drugs that were given to me as a treatment."
More than half of US states now have restrictions on when during the gestational period an abortion can legally be performed, and 13 states have total abortion bans that impede access to care with few exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy nonprofit organization.
Abortion denial has downstream effects on women's economic potential, Salganicoff said, impacting everything from their education level to their ability to advance in their careers.
For example, the ongoing "Turnaway Study" from the University of California, San Francisco, found that denying abortion care to women increases their likelihood of experiencing poverty, joblessness, and other economic hardships. Similarly, a recently published study from the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality found that restrictions on abortion access "pose significant risks to the well-being and economic security of women," especially low-income women.
The result harms women and the world at large, Young said.
"There's a lot of problems in the world. We probably want half of the population's brains helping solve these really hard problems," Young said. "I do."