Governments and businesses can make it easier for mothers to gain and keep employment in ways that do not make them choose between family and paid work.
Governments and businesses can make it easier for mothers to gain and keep employment in ways that do not make them choose between family and paid work.
W hat do we value about a human being? And what value do we place on him or her?
States now face these questions in new ways after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health. For some, the answer to how we value human beings rests on purely economic criteria.
A New York Times article recently examined the potential economic impact of abortion bans in states across the country. Pro-abortion politicians and advocates argued that restrictive abortion laws will drive workers and businesses out of states such as Texas and Florida; this will reverse the long-standing economic flight from blue states, they claim, and probably keep abortion on demand.
Implicit in these assessments is a perspective that reduces human beings to figures in economic output. We should value a person by how much he or she contributes to economic growth. People should be rated by their efficiency, by the hours they can pour in and how productive their line of work is in the market.
True, work certainly matters. Since the Garden of Eden, it has been part of what it means to be a flourishing human being. But we are not our jobs. Economic growth isn’t everything. Many elements contribute to living a fully human life.
We have families. We live in communities where we participate politically through government and socially through private associations. Many of us also belong to churches or other religious groups that prioritize loving God and our neighbors. Through these mediating institutions, we seek purposes such as cultivating virtue, beauty, and charity.
We must integrate these commitments into our role as economic beings, according to which the economy often serves or even takes a back seat to our other priorities. Subordinating these purposes to economics dehumanizes ourselves and others.
It dehumanizes babies to see them only as economic liabilities. It costs a lot of money to provide them adequate care. They demand much time and energy that parents could spend producing at work. Businesses seem better off without babies. We therefore see companies offering to pay the travel expenses for women to travel out of state and terminate their pregnancies, if they live in states with abortion bans or limits. This measurement of humanity by economic contribution presents the unborn as a negative statistic and disregards the intrinsic worth of every human life. Regardless of productivity, we must respect all lives, according to them the dignity they deserve. The unborn provide a particularly acute test of this vital principle.
Seeing women as primarily economic beings, tailored to be as productive as possible, with all barriers to productivity (i.e. babies) eliminated, dehumanizes them. The Times article quotes Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker as saying that we should view abortion “first as an issue of individual rights and freedom, and second as an economic issue.” Pritzker follows it up by saying that, “Workers care about this.”
Women shouldn’t be fooled by this rhetoric.
Again, Pritzker returns to classifying women by their economic status. Moreover, how does abortion manifest “individual rights and freedom”? In insisting it does, he denies the essential nature of motherhood and family. He degrades those women whose work focuses on the home and on raising children.
States should not keep abortion on demand for the sake of the economy. Instead, they should increase support for mothers in particular and parents in general. They should see the task of raising a child as an intrinsic good and as a service to the community. And they even can see it as an investment in future workers, so long as they do not reduce their worth to that point alone. States as well as private businesses can make it easier for mothers to gain and keep employment in ways that do not make them choose between family and paid work. In so doing, they will accomplish more than job growth. They will invest in the happiness and flourishing of all Americans.