Abortion is a direct attack on the working class. 49% of children killed by abortion lived below the federal poverty line. The next 26% lived at less than double the poverty line (Source). This means that 75% of abortions are performed on the working-class families who struggle most. The death of these children is considered acceptable, even positive, because they were too poor to live anyway. Population control isn’t just for the Third World, it’s also for the working-class in America. It’s no surprise that 180 CEOs wrote an open letter stating that banning abortion is “bad for business” (WaPo, June 6, 2019). In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism.” (Source)
Why do so many in the billionaire class love abortion? Ironically, it means more desperate workers. Killing babies might mean less workers in the long-term, but destroying the family means more workers right now. Capitalists make decisions based on short-term profits, not the impact on future generations. After the success of the liberal feminist movement of the 1970s (which included Roe v. Wade in 1973), large numbers of women entered the labor market and the two-income family became normal. Now that women are regular members of the workforce, capitalism prefers to keep them working without inconvenient “interruptions”, such as maternity leave or child-rearing responsibilities. This is why, in the pro-abortion 1992 Casey decision, the Supreme Court stated that “the capacity of women to act in society” was based largely on the availability of abortion. Frequently, women must take on part-time and poorly paid jobs so that they can balance motherhood with employment. This system encourages (and sometimes forces) women to put their younger children into daycare, which breaks down the family and adds yet another expense to working-class parents.
Pregnancy is treated as a disease or illness which must be cured so that women can get back into the for-profit labor force. As Erika Bachiochi explains “We’re not interested in ensuring women the capacity to act in society—to have a place in society—if they aren’t aping men. We can’t afford to do the much more difficult work of creating environments that welcome women who have children—which, of course, is the great majority of women. Instead, we’ll just continue to tell women what Roe told them a generation before. You choose: your baby or yourself, your baby or your future, your baby or your success; this is a man’s world, and you better become like a man—that is, not pregnant—if you want to succeed” (“How Abortion Hurts Women”). On average, American women want to have larger families (Source). Abortion conspires with debt and poverty to force women out of motherhood and into the job market. Giving birth to children and raising them well is incredibly hard work, but it doesn’t boost stock prices or increase the GDP, so the value of such in-home labor is $0.00 to the billionaire class.
It is a fact that in many societies women work in nearly every sector of life. But it is fitting that they should be able to fulfil their tasks in accordance with their own nature, without being discriminated against and without being excluded from jobs for which they are capable, but also without lack of respect for their family aspirations and for their specific role in contributing, together with men, to the good of society. The true advancement of women requires that labour should be structured in such a way that women do not have to pay for their advancement by abandoning what is specific to them and at the expense of the family, in which women as mothers have an irreplaceable role. (St. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens § 19)
