Women's Rights: Roe Vs. Wade

5. Women’s Rights

Roe vs. Wade is generally considered the “gateway decision” for women’s rights, because it showed the country that it was possible for women to win in the supreme court, in a country that had typically been very patriarchal. Beginning with events like the Salem witch hunt and the Anne Hutchinson being driven out of Massachusetts for being a woman preacher, women started out being considered inferior to men in America and, although that idea has become less and less prevalent, still exists in some areas to this day. The institutionalized sexism that permeated the United States is observable in cases such as Muller v. Oregon began to lessen heading into the 1920s, but with relatively minor achievements, such as equal

minimum wages in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital or eliminating obvious gender bias in Reed v.

Reed. The first major court case to lead up to Roe was Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave married women the right to buy contraceptives and established the idea that a woman’s reproductive future in marriage was part of her right to privacy. Past Roe there was a flood of cases involving women's rights presented, most notably a full 5 cases involving gender equality in 1975 alone. That flood became a trickle, partly because there were fewer issues that needed to be addressed, and partly because of the amount of resources used to protect the cases that were already won. Over $6,000,000 was spent by EMILY's list and Planned Parenthood in lobbying in North Carolina 2010 midterms, as compared to the 3 million spent by the Susan B. Anthony list (a pro-life group) on the same election(The Intensity Gap). Although both sides have feminist roots, they have very different views on abortion, causing for considerable amounts of money to be used lobbying for opposing sides of the same debate. Planned Parenthood has spent over half a million dollars every year for the past decade on lobbying, mainly to get people who are

pro-choice elected(Fig. 5.1).

Source: Planned Parenthood Lobbying History

The money spent by both sides has increased with significantly in the past few years, and abortion has become a far more pressing issue because of it. 231 abortion restriction were enacted in the United States between 2011 and 2014, as compared to the 95 laws designed to expand abortion access, or which 4 were introduced. This is compared to the past 3 decades seeing only 7 years with more than 20 abortion restrictions, and no years with 40 or more restrictions passed(Fig. 5.2). This is reflective of how lobbying has brought the debates that have been happening between the two sides of the abortion debate to the front of the public mind, and the effects that have followed.

6.

Conclusion

It can be determined that Roe v. Wade in general was beneficial to low income economies and women's rights, with the possible exception of lobbying for abortion protection and abortion prevention legislation pulling away funding that could have been used in more productive measures.

In regards to the economy, less money was spent on alcohol and cigarettes, leaving more money in the families to be used for things like food and clothing. The couple hundred to couple thousand dollars that is needed for an abortion easily offsets the on average $254,000 needed to raise a child to 18, and that extra quarter of a million dollars can be used to better the lives of the people having an abortion (This is How Much it Costs to Raise a Child).

This analysis suggests that the legalisation of abortion also, contrary to the opinion of the opposition, did not cause a decrease in GDP by decreasing consumer base, as the decreased crime rate and decreased infrastructure costs offset the decrease in economic activity. This is supported by the consistent GDP growth in the United States since 1970, with the exception of the 2008 housing

crisis.
This report does not recommend using portraying abortion legalisation as an economic policy, as a considerable number of other factors need to be included in the decision, including, but not limited to, the moral implications of legalisation, the overall health of the lower class, the ability to adequately provide regulated abortion facilities, and the need for population growth in a country. The report does find that in this particular instance of a country with a high percentage of the population in poverty, a dense urban population and a population nearing the carrying capacity of the country, such as the United States of America, that the decrease in low income population caused by legalized abortion allows for an overall economic benefit.
Additionally, this paper is not an endorsement of abortion, but rather a look at its macroeconomic effects and its cultural effects on women’s politics. Similar effects could be achieved by using other forms of contraception or by improving the economic positions of the children or parents in low income situation to avoid putting children in difficult situations.
This paper only looks at the perceived effect of Roe vs. Wade on low income economies and the women’s movement, and it is understood that a direct causation cannot be stated with 100% certainty because of outside factors such as other policy changes, societal changes, unrecorded grassroots movements, and countless other factors that aren’t accounted for. The premise is that the factors measured in this essay all point to one massive factor, namely Roe vs. Wade and the legalisation of abortion in the United States of America.