Abortion and Confronting Our Tolerance for A Visible Hand

Eric Fischer, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I do not think it is possible to write an essay that changes a stranger’s opinion about abortion.  There will always be conflict between the “life begins at conception” folks and the “bodily autonomy” folks regardless of the inconvenient realities of things like biology and the circumstances of conception.  However, in the wake of the Dobbs decision and with the mid-terms looming this fall, I have been examining my own views on abortion and how–or if–they align politically with other issues of importance to me.  Covid response, guns, taxes, education, energy policy, January 6, and as an economist:  free enterprise.   Its confirmed:  I am voting for no one this fall.

I first read George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm in high school English class.  During my freshman year of college, I devoured Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale.  A personal hardback copy was loaned to me by a sophomore in my dorm who ran with a group of upperclasswomen I looked up to with mystique:  they were impressively intellectual yet also slightly nerdy—a sophomore still living in the dorms?–but not weird enough that they stopped shaving their armpits or anything.

The Handmaiden’s Tale arrived on my milk-crate nightstand with the promise that although the plot would not be disclosed in advance, it was critical—as a female–that I read and internalized it.  It would challenge the way I viewed the circumstance of womanhood in society:  the person I was when I finished reading Atwood’s tome would emerge from a chrysalis of understanding having read it.

Being loaned that book, to be read on my own Glamour-Magazine-reading-time, was akin to induction into Skull and Bones for women or something.   As if such secret society existed at small state universities in Kansas and was run by dorm-dwellers.  I coveted membership and commenced reading with enthusiasm!

What I took away from that book was that the 1985 copyright made it hella old (eleven whole years), and that after reading three stories from the genre–one for mostly recreational reasons–I did not like dystopian literature.  That shit is depressing.

I resorted back to assigned readings from my business professors and the perusal of Glamour Magazine.  I had taken out my own subscription when I left for college.  As an eighteen-year-old freshman, I was now an adult.  Although I was never really interested in fashion, makeup, or women’s magazines, paying for my own issue delivered monthly to my dorm mailbox felt like an adulty, college thing to do.

The second most grown-up thing I did that fall was to apply for an absentee ballot to vote in my first ever presidential election.  This newly minted full-fledged adult did not want to miss out on anything:  Saturday football games, fraternity parties, or exercising my new rights at the ballot box.

I skipped most of the makeup, fashion, and exercise articles and focused more on the feature pieces in the magazine.  Glamour said the country would be facing the most critical election of my lifetime that November, and it was up to women like me to vote for Bill Clinton.  Although I had taken Civics in high school, Glamour walked me through an in-depth analysis of the current Supreme Court illustrating how the next president would likely fill some vacancies.  Women like me had to vote Clinton to save Roe!

Having so recently read The Handmaid’s Tale, you can bet your “Best Mascara for Under $10” and “How to Dress Like a Size 4 When You’re Really An 8” that I cast my vote for Slick Willie.   How cool was that?  My first presidential election and the most important election of my lifetime?  What were the odds?

Apparently, 1-to-1.   That was nearly thirty years ago.  No thanks to Glamour, I now spend way more than $10 on mascara and would love to have remained a size 8.  Additionally, every election since has been deemed the most critical election of my lifetime according to whatever media I am consuming at the time (much of which is diametrically opposed to the political orientation of my college magazine subscription).

Despite all the threats, warnings, and unfulfilled promises about saving the future via elections, there are factions of people who sincerely believe that America is currently living out Atwood’s and Orwell’s prophecies.  Some of them don’t shave their armpits either:  the militant feminists think Gilead is upon us, and the alt-right militia LARPers are deluded into believing they are fighting fascists who are everyone but themselves.

Honestly, I am not sure which is more dystopian:   both parties using Roe as cover for decades of abortion fear mongering as fundraising and campaigning tools rather than legislative objectives, or the electorate failing–after the same amount of time–to take the parties to task over the Groundhog Day playbook.

A business headline shortly following the Dobbs decision was published caught my eye:  “Chevron to sell California Headquarters and Move Jobs to Texas.”  My first thought was “I bet a good portion of their workforce is pissed!”  Sure, cost of living is significantly less, but I imagine some females in Chevron’s employ are a little reticent to move to state with the strictest abortion prohibitions in the country while its legislators are drafting legislation to prevent women from travelling out of state to receive legal medical care.   For some Chevron employees, this would preclude traveling back to a state they consider home.

To be clear, my child-bearing days are done, but women have the right to travel.  I want to be subjected to explaining the reasons for a flight from Houston to San Francisco while wearing stretchie pants about as much as I want to declare that I am not a sex worker while checking-in solo at a hotel.  Its laughable to me, that the red state politicians seriously discussing statutes regulating women’s travel are the very same officials touting the benefits of limited regulations and free market principles in their “business friendly” states.

In working to draft movement restriction bills to further fortify state abortion bans, General Counsel for the Thomas More Society, Peter Breen stated, “Just because you jump across a state line doesn’t mean your home state doesn’t have jurisdiction.”

If Black people have the right to stay in urban hotels and Grandma is not at risk for extradition back to Utah following her last casino trip, a uterus—despite its many wonderous powers—does not negate the legal relationship between the states or the states and the federal government.

Mr. Breen could not be more incorrect.  However dismayed I am at the legal argument put forth by the Thomas More Society, I am mildly entertained that an organization named in honor of a man who was beheaded for not signing the Oath of Supremacy is objecting to the protections afforded by the Supremacy Clause.  Additionally, as a cradle-Lutheran, I really cannot help but push back on any rationale associated with Sir Thomas More.  Reformed or not, Protestants can most assuredly hold five-hundred-year long grudges.

In addition to Orwell, Atwood, and Glamour Magazine, I have also availed myself of readings like Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil,” Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose, and Friedrich’s Hayek’s thoughts on spontaneous order.  Hayek expanded Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand in identifying how perpetual and dynamic feedback within complex markets manifest as price signals.  As his theories have since been applied to biological ecosystems and species, I see no reason they cannot also apply to the homo sapien species assessed via birthrate and the human condition.

Consider pre- and post-Roe America, and anticipate the ramifications of Dobbs.  Additionally, contemplate the environment in China during Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy.  It is not enough to examine what life is like when statues effectively require women to give birth,  we must also confront what life is like when the government requires women not to give birth.

As unsavory as coat hanger logos are, consider them alongside Chinese orphanages overflowing with little girls and rivers clogged with drowned babies.  There are extremely negative consequences of government intervention materializing into unwanted children.

A free market is indicated by voluntary exchange via mutual agreement, unmolested by externalities. Externalities like government policies.  It might be odd to consider pregnancies and births in the context of a free market for human reproduction, but not allowing a woman to terminate a pregnancy she does not desire to continue with–or limiting the number of children she can have–is neither voluntary, mutual, or absent interference.  It all certainly smacks of central planning.

There is a disparate intersection between generally correlated political positions on abortion in the US and support for free market principles.  An awkward junction that questions how firmly free market beliefs are held—be they positive or negative—when considered in tandem with regulations that affect reproduction.

It is inconsistent to fight the regulatory state on behalf of companies with one hand while trying to expand it for a group of people on the other.  Likewise, its most definitely conflicting to espouse economic policy that favors certain industries over others but reproductive policy that would tolerate abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason.

In a nod to dystopian concepts and to apply a stress test: does one’s position on terminating pregnancy shift if artificial womb technology replaces the need for space in women’s bodies?  If pregnancies can be ended without ending the lives sparked at conception, don’t both sides win?  I am not convinced, but it sure is interesting—if not depressing–to think about.

Being for regulation is being anti-free market, but not even Adam Smith would embrace anarchy. The trick is finding the balance.  How little regulation is enough?  This is a question that should be considered for commerce and technology but must be considered for human beings: women and unborn babies among them.  Drawing lines through grey is never easy, but perhaps more common ground for policy addressing abortion could be unearthed by discussions centered on the principles of regulation generally, rather than regulation specifically.  The objective not being to identify a universal position on abortion, but rather to define how much government force is acceptable regardless of the reason.  Only we the people can decide.