Economic Ramifications Of Women's Right To Choose
What I read: Sex and prosperity by Victoria Bateman. Published September 4, 2019.
In light of the recently leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v Wade and sentence women across the country to increasingly horrific lives as second-class citizens, this post feels necessary. At least it’s necessary for me. Necessary to speak the truth. Necessary to stand up for women. Necessary to clearly state that I support women’s full equality.
Women have the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. Women have the right to reproductive health care. That care must include the right to an abortion.
At the recent Bans Off Our Bodies Women’s March in San Francisco, I took this photo of a sign carried by a woman in front of me. Of course she’s angry. She should be angry. Women must feel exasperated with the continual need for them to demand to be treated on equal footing to men. To emphasize what a shit sandwich the entire situation is, another sign I saw just yards from this woman read “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.”
Victoria Bateman rightly points out in the article that women’s bodies have been and currently are political battlegrounds. Worldwide we are still dealing with cultures in every country suffering from the vestige of historical male dominance over women. The extremity of that oppressive dominance over women periodically subsides with two steps of progress forward, then one back, and sometimes sadly three or four steps back as women in the United States are now experiencing.
Abortion bans. Clothing restrictions for women’s garb. Sex worker laws. Inequity of pay. Systemic holding back of women from seats of corporate and political power. Too many single women left with supporting a family that a man has abandoned. I could go on. Women are often treated like crap in our country and around the world. Even as a gay man, especially a gay white man, I often feel like I have more rights than the average American woman.
That is a point I make when protesting naked. When I’m met with criticism and verbal abuse, my response is simple: if you don’t like women’s bodies featuring in the public sphere, then I’m not the one you need to get angry with. If women’s bodies weren’t political, I wouldn’t be spending my time giving naked talks to draw attention to the bleak reality. Blame politicians. Even better, blame the voters who vote for them.
The gist of Bateman’s article is nicely summarized by this.
Women’s freedom is central to making our societies more prosperous, more equal and more environmentally sustainable. Any attempt to undermine that freedom, no matter how well-intentioned, will make for a poorer and more unequal world.
None of us who are not women should misuse arguments that our lives will be better if women are treated equally, but that doesn’t preclude that the argument is true. It’s true. If we want a better world, a fairer world, a more equal world, a more peaceful world, women across the globe must be granted and receive entirely equal treatment under the law or our world is doomed to forever devolve into a worsening misogynistic mess.
To speak directly to the focus of the article, if women do not have control of their own bodies, their economic lives will always be beholden to the male-dominated culture that sees men as breadwinners while women are relegated to childcare labor and the heavy weight of economic burden that accompanies having to raise a child, often while also being told to work a full-time job as well.
No woman can be in control of her life, her labour and her finances without also being in control of her fertility.
Shockingly, there are some women who fall lockstep into the patriarchal mindset and attack other women by supporting anti-woman laws. I don’t understand it, but we all see anti-abortion women ready to strip away rights from other women. I have to hope they are the vast minority of women, but they are loud and vocal. Much like people in my own queer community who voted for Trump and who I consider traitors to LGBTQ people, I consider women who support enacting anti-abortion laws to be traitors to women.
Just as in those bad old days when we were bossed around by state and Church, today individual women are being told that someone else knows what’s good for them – often other women.
Without full equality for women (of course, for everyone), the world will never be economically fair. Women as second-class citizens will be destined to second-class economic futures. Sure, some women rise above the odds to attain a good economic status and even wealth, but overall their lot in life placed alongside their male counterparts is second tier. Us men have it a lot easier. We do. I know my simply being born a man has given me certain privileges and any man who denies that isn’t living in reality.
There was an English scholar named Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who fully understood the relationship between women’s equality and economic prosperity. Malthus’s views were discounted within economist circles for many years. Economic thought that free markets would ultimately lead to better equality for everyone or that continued economic growth is always possible never seem to include the second-class status of women as a factor in why an economy will never be truly of benefit to everyone.
Western world economies have been held up as the modern gold standard and Bateman argues that it’s because the West provided more freedoms to women which had a domino effect of bolstering the economies in which they lived and increasingly worked, albeit with lower pay and less recognition than their male coworkers. So, Bateman suggests, when explanations of why the West’s rise in dominance economically are discussed, women’s freedom never seems to be added into the equation, but Bateman believes it’s the proverbial elephant the room.
In Britain, at the footsteps of the Industrial Revolution, women there and in nearby European countries were able to live a life not enjoyed by women in other parts of the world. Women there were able to procure regular paid work, even though pay scales always languished. Women could decide for themselves who to marry, or whether to marry at all.
Marriages during those times created separate households and not simply extensions of the groom’s family and household. As a result, people often postponed marriage and associated baby-making to adjust to the economic landscape with which they are personally dealing. This helped keep the population numbers in check enabling better pay for workers.
The relatively greater degree of women’s freedom in Europe meant that the economy entered its virtuous circle in which higher wages and productivity growth positively fed back on each other.
Sadly, as we see my own country of the United States retreat into dark ages thinking regarding women and their right to decide when and if to give birth, many other countries are in even worse shape. Wages are low and labor is abundant in those countries, but it’s in part due to women there having little control over their own lives. Marriages can be forced or coerced. Once married, women end up with a life entirely deferent to their husband and his family and that often includes the directive to have as many babies as the husband decides, the wife’s needs or wants be damned.
Throughout the world, populations have grown due to public health advancements that increase one’s likelihood to live a longer life. But at the same time fertility rates have not dropped. In 1920, global population grew at no more than 0.6%, about what is was in 1760. But by 1962 global population growth had reached 2.1%. Since that growth has slowed to 1.2%, but the resulting rapid population growth in the prior decades ended up providing the world with a massive labor supply.
In 1962, we had about 3 billion people on the planet. Today it’s 7 billion. Global population is projected to reach 11 billion by 2100. All this growth has led to “one of the major developments in world economic history over the past 35 years,” a “significant expansion in effective labour supply.”
Globalization has often been touted as a net positive for the world. Perhaps some arguments can be made that’s true. However, it has also dramatically expanded the global labor supply and that’s resulted in the lessening of bargaining power in the West. The stunting of bargaining power stopped in its tracks wage and high productivity growth. The West now suffers from increasing economic inequality because businesses have been able to leverage much cheaper labor pools which brought about lower investment rates and slowing productivity.
The economic pie is expanding at a slower rate, and becoming more unequally distributed.
Minimum wage efforts have seen some resurgence, but the global problem of the world being awash in people and therefore workers blunts those efforts.
Many of the world’s economic maladies rest at the feet of inequality. When women have the power to control their own bodies, they are better able to lead lives that prevent population growth from undermining wage growth.
If women have control over their bodies, they will make fertility choices to help keep the wolf from their door. They will lead lives that help to prevent population growth from undermining wage growth. Economic empowerment is prerequisite for a woman to have such control over her body. Opportunities to become educated, to join the workforce and to be represented in political decisions (including about birth control) are all necessary. Rather than being a pawn, to be ‘married off’ at a young age and produce child after child, women with the opportunity to support themselves financially are able to take control of their lives. They have the freedom that allows them to go out into the world and build an independent life, determining for themselves whether, whom and when to marry. Women’s wombs become their own. Simply by being able to act in their own self-interest, women will, without knowing it, make choices that not only help themselves but that add up to a more prosperous and equitable global economy. And one that’s better for the planet.
Here is a set of data I did not know prior to reading the article. It shocked me, but I guess it shouldn’t have. I know we still live in a world in which men think that the mere random chance that they were born male somehow bestows on them an inherent right to dictate the lives of women. It’s kind of sick and twisted when one thinks about it, but it’s a harsh reality women in our own country and around the world face.
According to UNICEF, the proportion of women today aged 20-24 who were first married by the age of 18 stands at 41 per cent in West and Central Africa, 35 per cent in Eastern and Southern Africa, and 30 per cent in South Asia. Asia is home to almost half of all child brides; and one-third of them are in India. Globally, one in five girls marry before they are 18. The United Nations Family Planning Agency has documented that, once married (and, indeed, before), many of the world’s poorest women lack access to reliable birth control. Right now, for too many, the problem is getting worse not better.
China, for all its authoritarian warts and flaws, has proven to be an exception. Bateman argues this must be seen at least in part as the result of much lower fertility rates among women in China. Although China’s “one child policy” was controversial, it did help overcome the population problem that has plagued the standard of living throughout history.
Perhaps more people in my country and abroad will realize that by allowing women to take control of their own bodies, including whether to give birth or not, everyone will benefit because it will lift the entire country’s economy up and give everyone – man, woman, everyone – a better life overall.
Implementation of fertility rate controls have not been without some horrific consequences and those must be avoided, but at its core the argument that women having the ability to control their bodies is a huge net positive for an economy and the standard of living enjoyed not just by women, but by everyone.
I will end with the final three paragraphs of Bateman’s article which hammers home the necessity for women having the unbridled freedom to choose. Birth control is a right. Family planning is a right. Abortion is a right.
Some economists have expressed deep concern about the way in which a slowdown in population growth might harm the economy. Newspaper headlines deliver messages such as ‘the choice to be childless is bad for America’. This consternation ignores the fact that population growth has too often depended on women’s unfreedom. Population growth has in fact been built on women’s hard, unpaid labour. Women’s reproductive and domestic labour have, of course, historically been excluded from the cash economy.
In the longer view, equitable and environmentally sustainable growth is possible only if we give women freedom to take charge of their own fertility. While fertility rates have been falling in recent years, we still have a long way to go until women’s bodily autonomy becomes a reality for all women. At present, sadly, we risk moving backwards.
Inequality is one of the most pressing crises of our time, and we’re tackling it in precisely the wrong way. Rather than restricting the freedom of individuals, we should be increasing it, especially women’s freedom to control and make decisions about their own bodies. Respecting women’s autonomy and personhood will not only help the world’s women, it will create a more equal form of prosperity, one that’s better for the planet. If economics comes to embrace the sex factor, it could lead the way – rather than lag behind – in fighting for women’s freedom and a better world.
Bateman also wrote a book that I’ve added to my reading list, The Sex Factor: How Women Made The West Rich. In it Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender – ‘the sex factor’ – at the heart of the picture.
I feel I must conclude this post with a call to action. Right now women and allies need to remain organized and loud. Follow and fund Planned Parenthood. Take to the streets when the Women’s March organizes for women’s rights. And while I know it sounds terribly partisan to say this, vote for Democrats in every upcoming election. No, the Democrats aren’t perfect (no political party is or ever will be), but they clearly have the rights of women, including the right to choose, as an integral part of their agenda. Get involved in voter registration and get out the vote organizations like When We All Vote. A vote for Democrats at this point in time is a vote for women.
You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.