Being able to use contraception has had a significant impact on the quality of women’s lives, particularly by providing them with the economic autonomy to pursue goals, like becoming financially independent and obtaining a college degree. These insights were highlighted in a ThinkProgress article by Tara Culp-Ressler based on new research from the Guttmacher Institute (2)
Based on research conducted with over two-thousand women who received services from 22 family planning clinics located throughout the United States, 63 percent said their birth control allowed them to take better care of themselves or their families; 56 percent reported it helped them support themselves financially; 51 percent credited contraception with allowing them to complete their education; and 50 percent said it enabled them to either keep or get a job.
According to research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the use of birth control “accounted for a 10 percent narrowing of the wage gap” between men and women in the 1980s. The researchers argued increased that access and use of birth control was responsible for nearly one-third (31%) of the narrowing of the wage gap witnessed in the 1990s.
According to research from University of Michigan economist Martha Bailey, contraception’s role in allowing women to plan their families leads to reduced economic insecurity for children. Women with access to family-planning services are shown to provide their children with better access to education, which, in turn, allows children to eventually realize higher wages. They were also 5-percent less likely to live in poverty, 15 percent less likely to receive public assistance, and 4 percent less likely to be single parents.
The New York Times reported on an ongoing longitudinal study that compared women who wanted to receive, but were denied an abortion to women who were able to obtain the procedure. The study found that two years after being denied abortion services, women “were three times as likely to end up below the federal poverty line.”
In a January 2013, Atlantic Magazine columnist Jordan Weissmann investigated the long-term socio-economic impact of the lack of access to abortion nationwide.
“[M]any of the women who are denied funding for abortion have one anyway, usually at great sacrifice to themselves and their families. They may take on extra work or borrow from their rent or grocery budgets. Sometimes, because it takes time to find the money, the woman has to obtain the abortion at a later stage of pregnancy, when the procedure is more expensive and more complicated.”
Following Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, Weissmann says research finds that,
“Living standards of children growing up were very different as a result. Fewer children grew up living in poverty, fewer children grew up in single parent households, fewer children grew up in households headed by welfare recipients. You observe increases in college graduation, lower rates of welfare use for the children themselves, reduced likelihood of becoming a single parent themselves.”
In the face of these economic benefits, the Guttmacher Institute that “Eighty-seven percent of all U.S. counties lacked an abortion provider as of 2008.”