- The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday.
- Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to overturn the landmark ruling that legalized abortion.
- Experts and research say women would be worse off economically if abortion rights get thrown out.
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the nationwide right to an abortion guaranteed to women nearly 50 years ago under Roe v. Wade. The decision will have enormous consequences for women's economic progress.
"The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives," the opinion, written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, said.
The state of Mississippi had called on the Supreme Court to throw out abortion rights, and part of its argument was that women have made vast economic advancements since 1973, enabling them to go to work and maintain a family at the same time. Therefore, they argue, the need for an abortion is now irrelevant.
"The roles of women and men have been altered and workplace and cultural norms have progressed to make it easier for working mothers to balance professional success and family life," Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said to a crowd outside the Supreme Court as it heard oral arguments on the monumental case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, on December 1.
Experts told Insider before the ruling that they've drawn the opposite conclusion. They cited a range of research that found abortion legalization has significantly contributed to women's progress by reducing rates of teen motherhood and maternal mortality. It's also increased rates of educational attainment, workforce participation, and earnings. With Roe v. Wade overturned, women — and the economies to which they contribute — will be set back, they said before the decision.
In 2018, Mississippi passed a law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, earlier than the standard established in Roe, which is roughly 24 weeks. That's the point when a fetus can survive outside of the womb, commonly referred to as viability. Lower courts have struck down the law as unconstitutional, and the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take up the challenge.
With the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Mississippi law in a 6-3 ruling, 26 states are widely expected to restrict abortion soon afterward, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health data organization that supports abortion rights
There are 13 states, including Mississippi, with so-called trigger laws that automatically ban all or nearly all abortions. That means in a post-Roe future, some women seeking abortions would have to travel far distances to obtain one.
"This is going to create just a perfect storm of concentrated human misery," Kimberly Kelly, a sociology professor focused on abortion politics at a Mississippi college, said before the decision.
"The people who will lose access will be Black women, brown women, poor women and young women," Kelly added. "If Roe is overturned, abortion is going to become a function of class privilege. Affluent women who can travel, will travel. Only women with certain levels of economic resources will be able to travel."
'Poorer, stuck with abusive partners, and less bonded with their children'
Carole Joffe, a Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health professor at the University of California San Francisco, said a world without Roe "will have real public health impacts."
It will also have economic ones, research shows. The Turnaway Study from The University of California, San Francisco consists of interviews with nearly 1,000 women over five years. Some of them received abortions, and others were denied them "because they were past the facility's gestational age limit."
The results found that women denied abortions faced "worse financial, health and family outcomes." Those who were denied and still had to deliver a child "experienced an increase in household poverty lasting at least four years relative to those who received an abortion," according to a fact sheet of the study. It also found that women denied abortions were more likely to struggle years later to afford basic expenses, and were three times more likely to be unemployed.
Another paper analyzed 10 years of credit report data with that same group of women and found that those denied abortions experienced "large and persistent increase in financial distress" for several years. They had a 78% increase in debt that was 30 days or more past due, and an 81% increase in other negative financial events like bankruptcy or eviction.
Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, has marketed the state's challenge against abortion as a fight to "empower women."
But Joffe said she can't "understand the empowerment argument."
"The women who didn't get abortions, they weren't empowered. They were poorer, stuck with abusive partners, [and] less bonded with their children," she said, referring to findings in the Turnaway Study.
'An America in which Roe is overturned is an America in which abortion access becomes highly unequal and uneven'
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, is among 154 economists that filed a brief to the Supreme Court to correct Mississippi's claim that abortion is no longer necessary today. The group cited numerous studies that point to the benefits women have experienced because of Roe, and the potential setbacks they would face if it's overturned.
"We certainly saw that Roe impacted women and their families," she said. "And I think we're likely to see an impact of its reversal."
"Women who are seeking abortions are overwhelmingly in very difficult life situations. They're overwhelmingly already mothers. They're low income. More than half of them are experiencing disruptive life events, like losing a job. And many of them are credit-constrained," Myers said, adding that without access to abortion, the evidence shows that their financial situations will deteriorate.
"An America in which Roe is overturned is an America in which abortion access becomes highly unequal and uneven across the country," Myers said.
Women in Texas have already been traveling out of state to get an abortion. Since September 1, Texas has banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, a time when many women do not yet know they are pregnant. The law has managed to stand because of its unique design, which invites ordinary citizens, rather than state officials, to enforce the ban. The Supreme Court on December 10 ruled that Texas' law can remain in place, but that abortion providers could proceed with a lawsuit against state officials in an attempt to strike down the law.
Using Guttmacher Institute data, the following map shows the percent-increase in average distance traveled in the 26 states where abortion will likely be prohibited now that Roe is overturned:
C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, previously told Insider that she's concerned about such a reality because "expenses are increased" for "women who actually have to fly out of the state in order to access services."
Having to travel out of state for an abortion could be expensive. Mason said this could include lost hours in working, resulting in lost earnings, or having to pay for a hotel.
Mason said it's especially important for lower-income women and women in poverty to have access to reproductive health services, such as abortion providers, for their economic security.
"Not only because delaying care can result in an unwanted, full-term pregnancy or having an additional child to take care of, but also impacts their labor force participation," Mason said. "So it's really a domino effect."
Without reproductive rights, women 'can't fully participate in social life and political life and economic life'
Abortion restrictions also place an economic burden on states, research from the Center for the Economics of Reproductive Health at the Institute for Women's Policy Research found.
The nonprofit wrote that, "state-level abortion restrictions cost state economies $105 billion dollars per year—by reducing labor force participation and earnings levels and increasing turnover and time off from work among women ages 15 to 44 years."
Furthermore, an extra 505,000 women aged 15 to 44 who would earn about $3 billion each year would be able to participate in the workforce, IWPR found.
The following chart shows how labor force participation for women of differing race and ethnicity will increase if abortion restrictions were eliminated.
Earnings would also increase at varying rates by race and ethnicity:
"These laws impact women's economic security and wellbeing, and it's even more consequential for lower-wage workers and women of color who don't have access to benefits like paid sick and family medical leave," Mason told Insider.
"If you cannot control when you have children, how many children you have, whether you have children at all, you can't fully participate in social life and political life and economic life," Kelly said. "It puts women in a position of dependency and economic dependency on men."