Lady Business: Seamless garments and the economics of abortion rights

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-eighth issue, published May 16, 2019.
 

Consistent Ethics

(Source: CNN.)

 
I grew up Catholic. Very Catholic. Not just Mass-every-Sunday and Catholic-school-for-my-entire-education observant; Catholicism was embedded in my parents’ professional identities and our family’s social life. A theologian and a musician who have spent most of their careers employed by Catholic institutions, my parents were also para-professional Catholics, always deeply involved in the liturgy and community life of the churches we attended.
 
I also spent most of my childhood criticizing Catholicism, for many reasons (starting with that whole women-can’t-be-priests thing). But parts of it have inevitably stuck with me. One piece I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past week is the “seamless garment” doctrine, or the “consistent ethic of life.”
 
Proposed by Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernadin in the 1980s, this “consistent ethic” is pretty much what it sounds like: If you’re going to call yourself “pro-life,” you can’t be a hypocrite. If you’re going to advocate against abortion on moral grounds, then you have an equal responsibility to advocate against the death penalty. Against gun violence. Against police killings of unarmed civilians. Against rape, and domestic violence, and human rights violations, and climate change, and genocide.
 
And here’s where it gets really tricky: You have an equal responsibility to advocate for life once it arrives on this earth -- and for the women who are physically and financially and professionally burdened by your moral imposition on their bodies. You have to actively advocate for women, especially for the lower-income and minority women whose livelihoods are most threatened by unwanted pregnancies. That means advocating for equal access to affordable healthcare, and universal childcare, and education. For a living wage, and paid parental leave, and equal pay. If you’re against abortion, you have to advocate just as hard for policies that ensure that every child who gets born gets born to a healthy, wealthy mother.
 
Which, of course, is not our economic reality:
 

Economics frequently drive women to seek an abortion in the first place. Unintended pregnancies have become increasingly concentrated among low-income women, who by 2011 were more than five times as likely to experience one as those with greater means. Among women getting an abortion, a 2004 survey found, the most frequently cited reasons were that a new child would interfere with education or work or that women couldn’t afford to have a baby at that time. Abortion rates rose during the recent recession, particularly among low-income women, as they and their partners lost jobs and income.
 
And economics reverberates throughout women’s lives when they can’t get the abortions they need. In a study of women who sought an abortion, those who were unsuccessful were three times as likely to fall into poverty over the following two years as those women who were able to get one, despite beginning in comparable financial situations. They were also more likely to wind up unemployed.

 
But fixing structural inequality and systemic poverty is, like, so hard! It’s so much simpler to just sign a “fetal heartbeat” bill and walk away, smugly congratulating yourself on doing “what is right, not what is easy.” That’s from Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who doesn’t seem to apply the same “right vs. easy” logic to how he addresses school shootings.
 
Or there’s Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, who just signed a law created by the above 25 white men, effectively banning abortion in her state. Ivey, who supported accused child molester Roy Moore in his Senate campaign, presides over a state with the second-highest infant-mortality rate in the country, and the sixth-highest overall poverty rate. Alabama is one of only two states with no equal pay laws protecting women from discrimination. It has no maternity or family-leave laws. It has rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, meaning that most poor families don’t qualify for government-provided health benefits.
 
Yes, those are hard problems to solve, some of which require more than a single law. And consistency in ethics is practically difficult even for the most well-meaning of individuals. (So is practicing what you preach: Bernadin, who was one of the most admired American Catholics when he died in 1996, also helped protect some priests who sexually abused children, according to documents released in 2014.)
 
So perhaps it’s overly idealistic of me to expect “pro-life” policymakers to apply their loudly-avowed ethics to more than a single issue. But there’s trying to be consistent -- and then there’s not trying at all.
 
For example, Ivey has also signed laws making it easier to carry out the death penalty in Alabama: “Opponents, including the American Bar Association, say the law will increase the likelihood that the state will put an innocent person to death.”
 
Yet on Wednesday, this is how the same woman explained her decision to sign the most restrictive state abortion ban in decades: The law “stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious,” Ivey said, apparently without irony. “That every life is a sacred gift from God.”
 

Lady Bits

 
--This was not the issue I had planned for this week, but yikes. (Some good lists of how to help women affected by the bans, from The Cut and The New York Times.) Stay tuned for a report next week from my recent trip to Bentonville, Arkansas, for Geena Davis’s annual inclusive film festival there.
 
--On the subject of the wonderful Catholics who I grew up with (and who put up with lots of my obnoxious teenage questioning), happy birthday to my amazing Aunt Joanne!
 
--Book stuff: I’ll be in Chicago Tuesday to moderate a panel and discuss my book at Inc.’s Fast Growth Tour. If you’re around and want to check it out, please let me know!
 
--Speaking of consistency problems and the treatment of women … every recent Game of Thrones episode kinda makes me regret my decision to come back for the ending, but I certainly feel part of the monoculture schadenfreude! Nerd giggle of the week:

 
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