WV’s Abortion Ban Is About Controlling Lives, Not Saving Lives
An Abortion Ban Will Make A Bad Situation Worse in WV. That’s The Point.
UPDATE: Gov. Jim Justice signed HB302 into law on September 16, 2022, banning abortions in WV, with very few and very onerous exceptions.
On September 13, 2022, the Republican-dominated West Virginia legislature passed a strict abortion law with few medical exceptions – the bill is heading to Gov. Jim Justice’s desk where it is likely to be signed.
The debate around the abortion ban has been layered with hypocrisy from Republican lawmakers, and every layer of hypocrisy has been carefully wrapped around what will be the real political and economic harms: the continued erosion of our democracy and a more deeply entrenched oligarchy with widening income and wealth inequality.
What Lies Beneath Layers and Layers of Hypocrisy
There are so many layers to the debate around abortion rights, and nearly every layer features Republican hypocrisy. For decades Republican hypocrisy on the issue of abortion has been pointed out again and again and again. At one rhetorical level, George Carlin highlighted back in 1996 the hypocrisy of “pro-life” conservatives on the issue of abortion versus childcare.
Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re f*#*ked.
At a constitutional law level, the argument from state’s rights conservatives has been essentially that the decision should not be made at the federal level and Roe was an overreach because it violated Tenth Amendment rights. Lindsay Graham has made that a blatant lie with promises to pass a federal abortion ban if Republicans take control of Congress in November.
Then there’s the level of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court legislating from the bench – which conservatives have long proclaimed is the real issue with the Roe decision. But the Dobbs decision doesn’t just overturn Roe – it also casts more doubt and obfuscation on the concept of ‘privacy’ itself. The concept of a ‘right to privacy’ is a concept that was legally murky at best even before the Dobbs decision ejected an entire body of judicial precedent on the matter.
With the passage of West Virginia’s abortion ban, the legislature has established a protocol for reporting abortions to the state government, essentially wedging West Virginia’s government between a woman and her doctor.
(a) Each abortion, as defined in §16-2R-2 of this code, which occurs in this state, shall be reported to the section of vital registration no later than the tenth day of the month following the month the procedure was performed by the person in charge of the hospital in which the abortion was performed. The State Registrar shall prepare a form or provide a suitable electronic process for the transmission of the reports from the institution or physician to the section of vital registration. Information to be collected shall include:
(1) The gestational age of the fetus;
(2) The state and county of residence of the patient;
(3) The age of the patient;
(4) The type of medical or surgical procedure performed;
(5) The method of payment for the procedure;
(6) Whether birth defects were known, and if so, what birth defects;
(7) The date the abortion was performed;
And while the law farcically claims that “no personal identifiers, including, but not limited to, name, street address, city, zip code, or social security number, will be collected,” the amount of information that must be reported to a government database includes plenty of information to identify the patient. So much for small government or conservative complaints about databases of citizens.
Then there’s the matter of the rights of the individual and the right to bodily autonomy, a right that self-proclaimed libertarian conservatives assert is the prime human right from which all other rights derive. On the issue of abortion many, such as WV state Senator Patricia Rucker and Congressman Alex Mooney, are willing to forsake individual rights to appease the religious right.
At the religious level the hypocrisy lies clearly in the reality that it essentially codifies a set of Christian beliefs (which are not even shared by all Christians) as the basis for determining when “life” begins. In doing so, this law codifies the creed of some Christians into law, prioritizing those beliefs over all other religions in West Virginia.
These layers of apparent hypocrisy peel back like layers of an onion, and they are all a cover for the real goal of anti-abortion politicians and their paymasters pushing abortion bans, which is to entrench oligarchy through:
1) political oppression in terms of limiting civil rights, such that more than half of West Virginia’s people have been relegated to something less than full citizens, lacking full rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, and
2) economic oppression through widening income and wealth inequality, more disparate health outcomes, along with curtailed educational and labor opportunities for present and future generations.
These are the real goals of abortion bans and laws that force births. As many people have pointed out: there’s no way to ban abortions in a state, there are only ways to ban safe and legal abortions. And at that, wealthy women and the mistresses of wealthy men will always have access to abortions because they can afford to travel to someplace where they are legal, be that Mexico or Ireland1, or most other developed countries in the world.
How Abortion Bans Entrench Oligarchy
There are decades of research on how abortion bans drive inequality. A 2019 fact sheet from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research lays it plain:
Access to abortion not only allows women to better control their fertility, but importantly, it also changes their expectations about childbearing and their control over it. As a result, women may invest more heavily in their own human capital, leading to increased schooling and improved labor market outcomes; this is true even for women who never have an unintended pregnancy. These benefits may extend beyond the cohorts of women who initially gained access to abortion, to subsequent generations of women and men. [Emphasis added]
…
Conversely, restrictions on abortion access have the potential to harm women—and later generations—rather than help them. In particular, policies that restrict access based on economic status, such as those prohibiting Medicaid funding for abortion, not only limit women’s reproductive autonomy but also further threaten their economic well-being
The West Virginia abortion ban makes a special point that “No funds from the Medicaid program accounts may be used to pay for the performance of an abortion unless the abortion is permitted by §16-2R-3” of the abortion ban.2
After the Dobbs decision, Isabel V. Sawhill and Morgan Welch wrote for the Brookings Institute that
the states where children are more likely to be born into the worst circumstances, and are receiving the least support after birth, also tend to be the ones that are restricting a women’s right to choose. The bottom 10 states in our ranking are: Missouri, Idaho, Florida, South Dakota, Tennessee, Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas.
West Virginia narrowly missed Sawhill and Welch’s list, most likely because West Virginia accepted the Obamacare Medicaid Expansion funds: nearly 30% of West Virginian families (564,000 people) are on Medicaid. That’s the highest share in the country. Fully 53% of all children in West Virginia are covered by Medicaid, including 56% of special needs children.
And in January 2022 West Virginia was rated by WalletHub as the 45th worst state to raise a family:
“West Virginia was ranked … 43rd in education and child care. Because of West Virginia’s high poverty level, it received 49th place for average family income and 46th for percentage of families in poverty.”
Moreover, right now West Virginia has a higher rate of children in the foster care system than any other state. As Eric Douglas for West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported on September 13, 2022:
Jeff Pack, the commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Resources Bureau for Social Services, told the West Virginia Legislature’s Committee on Children and Families that almost 13 out of every 1,000 children in West Virginia are currently in the state’s foster care system. The positive to come out of the situation is that nearly half of those children are in kinship care.
“As of the end of the month, we had over 6,600 kids in state custody,” Pack said. “Forty six percent of those — over 3,000 — were placed with kinship care.”
To recap: presently, West Virginia is ranked near the bottom of places to raise a family, with the highest share of Medicaid recipients in the country, the highest share of children in foster care in the country, more than half of children qualifying for Medicaid, and somewhere between 35,000 and 43,000 children being cared for by their grandparents. That’s the status of the state before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe and West Virginia’s Republican-dominated legislature passed legislation banning abortions.
Forced Births Entrench Oligarchy and Hurt Communities
In an article for EquitableGrowth.org published after the Dobbs decision, authors Christian Edlagan, Maria Monroe, and Emilie Openchowski highlighted the extent of research showing the connection between abortion bans and negative economic outcomes:
the reality is that access to these important healthcare and family planning options has vast economic and financial impacts on the lives of people who may become pregnant and their families.
An array of research already documents the links between bodily autonomy and economic opportunity, as well as the economic impacts of access to abortion and contraception. Studies find, for instance, that access to birth control pills were directly linked to women’s increased labor force participation and reductions in the gender wage divide. Other research demonstrates that access to abortion improves financial outcomes and reduces the likelihood of a woman being in poverty for up to 4 years, as well as facilitates many labor market opportunities for women and boosts educational outcomes.
The converse of all this research is that restricting access to abortions and to birth control has the opposite effects: lowered labor force participation from women, a widened gender wage divide, worsened financial outcomes, increased likelihood of poverty, and reduced educational outcomes.
Another impact that has been overlooked in this discussion is that women already received less in Social Security than men on average, and often this is a direct result of women leaving the workforce during their prime working years to raise children. If a woman drops out of the labor force because they are forced to carry an unintended pregnancy with an abusive partner, they not only lose out on financial autonomy and earnings in the present – it reduces their future earnings too as a function of earnings not paid into Social Security today, and that in turn will hurt their future families and widen future wealth inequality.
The repercussions of an abortion ban in place for even one year will last for at least a generation, and likely longer as wealth disparities are further entrenched in West Virginia.
But for politicians who are paid to bring about and entrench oligarchy for their paymasters, these aren’t unintended side effects or pesky bugs to be worked out, these are all features of an abortion ban. That’s why nobody from the anti-abortion crowd bothered to propose legislation that would boost public assistance for expecting mothers.
Abortion bans are an assault on civil rights, and they are also an assault on economic rights and economic freedom, with an all too predictable outcome that the generational wealth gap will widen along with income inequality and increasingly unequal health, educational, and economic outcomes.
George Carlin was right about how pro-life politicians behave. But they don’t behave the way they do and promote these bans because they are hypocrites about being pro-life. They promote these bans because they know exactly whose lives will be hurt. They want to hurt, burden, and further impoverish working families, women, children, minorities, grandparents, and their communities.
They want people so overwhelmed and exhausted and living so near the edge that those people can’t participate in our politics; they want people so desperate, poor, and crushed with debt that people will accept any job no matter how close to indentured servitude it may be; and they want people to move away in disgust — because oligarchical power concentrates as the population dwindles and scrutiny disappears.
I chose Ireland as an example because it is a very Catholic country that legalized abortion by referendum in 2018.
The exceptions to the ban are few and burdensome, including the involvement of law enforcement to prove incest or rape of a juvenile, and requiring the doctor to make the correct ‘reasonable’ call (in whose opinion?) or risk losing their medical license or criminal prosecution and hefty fines. Few providers will take that risk, and rural and poorer areas where people cannot travel easily will lose out on medical care providers, which will in turn worsen health outcomes in every county in West Virginia, Since health outcomes are so closely connected to economic outcomes, this will all further entrench the power of West Virginia’s political and economic elite.