We Have to Talk About More than Just Abortion
“It’s about whether or not women have equal standing in this country, and whether or not we’re going to claim that power as working people” –Sara Nelson, President AFA-CWA
A couple of weeks ago after a Labor Council Delegates meeting, a union sister and I were talking about the hardships so many women face right now, and she burst out in frustration:
“We should all be talking about the abortions we’ve had. I’ll bet many of us in this movement have had them, and yet we never say anything about how much that helped us in our lives.”
I agreed with her. If not for an abortion in my first year of college, I would not have the life I do today. To give birth to a baby at 18 would have completely derailed my plans for the future. And at the time, 1983, it was entirely reasonable and within my rights to determine what to do with my body and to plan when and with whom I would have a child when I was economically and emotionally ready.
Being able to take one’s bodily autonomy for granted is, of course, no more in large swathes of the United States in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and revert the legality of abortion back to the states. Currently, abortion has been banned or severely restricted in much of the country, and now even in vitro fertilization and birth control have been imperiled.
In his recent book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, labor journalist Hamilton Nolan spends a chapter covering Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, as she contemplated running for president of the AFL-CIO. Nelson is a progressive, charismatic leader and very much committed to gender equity.
One thing that stands out in Nolan’s chapter is Nelson’s deep commitment to women workers in part because she’s a flight attendant and, in her words, the wage gap between men and women workers is “right in my face on the airplane.” Nelson’s response to the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning women’s rights to an abortion was to push back on looking at this as a single issue. On a call with the AFL-CIO’s executive council right after Dobbs came down, she said:
“This is the first step to authoritarianism.” That’s where we’re headed. If we don’t understand that, and we don’t understand that we have to step out right now, and not just say that we’re for Roe v. Wade, but that we’re for women—for women having equal rights in this country . . . It’s not about health care. It’s not about an abortion. It’s about whether or not women have equal standing in this country and whether or not we’re going to claim that power as working people. . . . But I don’t know that this labor movement, the leadership of this labor movement, is ready for this moment.
Nelson, along with my union sister and many others in labor, see clearly that forcing birth on women not only impacts them emotionally and physically but also economically and as workers. Both pre- and post-Dobbs, study after study has been done showing the economic benefits of reproductive rights for women and the negative impacts unplanned pregnancies and births can have on a woman’s life—and on the lives of children.
In her study in the Economic Policy Institute, “The Economics of Abortion Bans: Abortion Bans, Low Wages, and Public Underinvestment Are Interconnected Economic Policy Tools to Disempower and Control Workers,” Asha Banerjee argues “that abortion access is fundamentally intertwined with economic progress and mobility,” and that “in states where abortion has been banned or restricted, abortion restrictions constitute an additional piece in a sustained project of economic subjugation and disempowerment.”
The key findings in the study are that:
States with abortion restrictions or total bans have on average:
lower minimum wages ($8.17 compared with $11.92 in the abortion-protected states)
unionization levels half as high as those in the abortion-protected states
only three in 10 unemployed people receiving unemployment insurance (compared with 42% in other states)
lower rates of Medicaid expansion
an incarceration rate 1.5 times that of the abortion-protected states
Further, Banerjee explains, “Abortion restrictions are planks in a policy regime of disempowerment and control over workers’ autonomy and livelihoods, just like deliberately low wage standards, underfunded social services, or restricted collective bargaining power.” She calls for policy makers to prioritize this issue “as widespread abortion bans will contribute to a loss in economic security and independence for millions in the current and future generations.”
Banerjee also points out that states that have abortion protected have double the union density as those that have restricted access. She notes:
Unions are a critical intermediary in worker empowerment and economic mobility. Abortion-restricted states—many in the South and Midwest—have enacted anti-union and anti-collective bargaining policies for decades. These laws suppressing worker power and collective action have led, in part, to the abysmally low levels of union density we see today. As with the minimum wage, the states that are anti-union are largely also abortion-restricted. Unionization and abortion access are both mechanisms for economic freedom and mobility. Economic concerns and policies concerning workplace, employment, pregnancy and childbearing, and raising children are all connected.
Thus, it is incumbent upon labor leaders to prioritize this issue, as unions are in a unique position to materially benefit workers’ lives and use the political sphere to enact such change. Abortion and reproductive rights are a lynchpin in addressing economic and other inequalities.
In a Center for American Progress article outlining not only the specific economic harms abortion bans inflict on women and their families but also the educational and financial gains women have made since Roe v. Wade was passed, authors Lauren Hoffman, Osub Ahmed, and Isabela Salas-Betsch show that:
Research confirms the positive effects of abortion legalization on a range of economic indicators, including labor force participation, educational attainment, earnings, and child poverty—with particularly notable gains for Black women. Moreover, when women are denied access to abortion, it can negatively affect their economic security and that of their families, and state and local economies can suffer significant financial losses.
And when women themselves are asked about what unplanned pregnancies could do to their lives, as an Urban Institute survey did in 2016 and 2018, “More than 8 in 10 women surveyed in 2016 said an unplanned birth would negatively affect a woman’s life, with more than half of women reporting a negative outcome for at least four of seven aspects of their lives. Most—close to 2 in 3—worried about negative effects on a woman’s education, followed by concerns about her income, mental health, and job.”
As one interviewee put it: “Everyone should have their own choice. That is the whole thing with our beautiful country, where we have our own choice and options and freedom.… Nobody knows nobody’s situation, and nobody can tell anybody what to do.”
As unionists, we need to listen to our members, share our own experiences, and fight like hell to protect workers’ lives. Framing abortion and reproductive rights as an economic issue—as a moral choice to support women and their families—is how we should be talking about it. The Right has erased women and their actual lives from the debate. They shouldn’t be getting away with that.
Those of us in labor, particularly those of us who’ve walked in the same shoes as our members, are obligated to make our members’ reproductive needs a central priority.