Republicans Can’t Shut Up About How Aborted Fetuses Could Be Workers

As anti-abortion politicians scramble for ways to talk about their lethally unpopular abortion bans, going as far as to claim over the weekend that women don’t care and have moved on from the issue, they continue to lean on the most dismal of talking points: economics. Last summer, House Republicans blamed depleted social security funds on abortion reducing the “supply” (vom) of future workers. Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) said at the time:

If you think about 70 million people being aborted over the last 49 years, assuming half and half men and women…70 million not in the workforce, assuming they have a child, two children, we’ve got somewhere between 100, 140 million people that have not worked, that are not with us because of the Roe v. Wade issue. And so, we’ve taken away the very workforce that was needed to supply both social security and Medicare.

It’s certainly a more convenient explanation than the truth, which is that Republican lawmakers have been hacking away at the social safety net for decades.

Hern further cited his caucus’ Ways and Means Committee website, which claims “abortion shrinks the labor force,” and that “if all of these aborted babies had been otherwise carried to term and survived…they would add nearly 20 percent to the current U.S. population, and nearly 45 million would be of working age.” In 2019, abortion rights caused “the loss of nearly 630,000 unborn lives,” and “cost the U.S. roughly $6.9 trillion, or 32 percent of GDP.” These “lives,” to be clear, are fetuses and embryos, whom Republicans humanize solely to deny rights to pregnant people or make some bullshit point about capitalism.

Much could be said about all of the dubious math that’s driving this new anti-abortion talking point, but Yellen’s comments were absolutely correct: Our labor force benefits when people who can get pregnant and their partners can get the abortion and contraceptive care they need to plan their families, lives, and, certainly, their careers. Many people are able to have children specifically because they were able to get abortion care when they weren’t yet ready to have kids. Longitudinal research has shown how being denied an abortion can push someone—and their children—deeper into poverty for years.

As more and more Republicans lean into the imagined economic boon of their abortion bans, they’re really saying the quiet part out loud: Their anti-abortion stance has little to do with caring for babies and families, but rather, controlling workers’ reproduction and extracting as much of their labor as possible. As I wrote last summer, reproductive oppression is a central piece of capitalism. Forced pregnancy and birth necessarily keep workers poor, all while creating new, future generations of workers to exploit—an endless “supply.” Low-income people are deliberately targeted by criminalization of their pregnancy outcomes or varying abortion restrictions, like the Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited Medicaid coverage of most abortions since 1976.