Authored by: Aislinn Reekie

Care work, whether paid or unpaid, is the foundational infrastructure of the workforce. When reproductive healthcare is restricted, women’s ability to balance caregiving responsibilities and economic participation can be disrupted. These restrictions can have lasting educational and economic consequences, including decreasing the likelihood that a woman will graduate from either high school or college, lowering her earnings throughout her life, and, in some cases, leading her to work more hours and give birth to more children. Restrictive abortion laws do not operate in isolation from the rest of the economy; they directly influence how women make decisions about work and family, causing broad economic impacts. These can include generally shrinking state economies and lowering workforce participation. Additionally, such laws disproportionately affect women of color and low-income women, who are heavily represented in care sectors such as early childhood education and direct care. Since these low-wage roles rarely offer paid leave or comprehensive healthcare benefits, caregivers in these fields are less equipped for the financial and logistical barriers associated with restricted abortion access, leaving both these workers and the sectors they work in especially vulnerable.

State-Level Economic and Labor Market Impacts

The relationship between reproductive autonomy and the economy is interconnected. Research links restrictive abortion environments with economic, labor market, and maternal health outcomes.

In states with restrictive reproductive policies, these patterns include:

• Suppressed labor force participation: The Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates that removing legal and logistical barriers to abortion care could enable nearly 325,000 additional women to join the labor force annually.
• Compounded employer costs: businesses operating in restrictive legal climates face higher turnover rates, increased talent acquisition costs, and reduced productivity as workers navigate healthcare gaps and caregiving responsibilities.
• Correlated adverse outcomes: generally, the stricter a state’s abortion legal framework, the more severe its adverse economic indicators and maternal mortality rates tend to be.

Harsher Disparities for Low-Income Women

For lower-income households, restrictions on reproductive healthcare amplify pre-existing economic insecurity. Research on abortion timing and access finds important differences across socioeconomic groups. This includes:

• Timing delays and financial obstacles: low-income women seeking abortion services experience significant delays compared to medium- to higher-income women, obtaining abortions at an average of 8.6 weeks of pregnancy versus 8.0 weeks, respectively. Navigating travel expenses, time off work, childcare arrangements, and mandatory waiting periods contribute to delays in accessing care.
• Long-term financial strain: carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term has been found to increase the odds that a woman’s household income is below the federal poverty line by almost four times. Being denied an abortion can exacerbate the financial hardships lower-income women already face.

Disproportionate Harms for Women of Color

The intersection of race, poverty, and state abortion laws creates unique challenges for women of color in accessing reproductive healthcare.

• Economic barriers to healthcare access: demographic data from legal and economic studies show that Black and Hispanic women face significant structural disparities compared to white women, particularly regarding wage gaps, employment in care roles, and lower rates of employer-provided healthcare. In states with restrictive abortion laws, these underlying economic barriers can further complicate access to reproductive healthcare.
• Public funding restrictions: state restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion have been associated with lower abortion rates among Hispanic women.
• Systemic intersections in care: women of color face disparities across both paid and unpaid care work. Black women are disproportionately employed in low-wage care roles, such as direct care, home health assistance, and early childhood education. These sectors rarely provide comprehensive healthcare coverage or paid leave, limiting the employment benefits available to Black women working in these roles. Latina and Asian women shoulder a disproportionate load of unpaid caregiving, spending “about an hour a day on average providing unpaid care – more than any other group.” This unpaid care is valued at a combined $188 billion annually. Restrictive reproductive laws can compound these existing caregiving and economic disparities, impacting health and economic outcomes.

Research Gaps: Abortion Access and the Care Economy

Economic analyses demonstrate that abortion restrictions shrink state economies and decrease workforce participation, but research gaps remain. Existing studies largely focus on indicators like total state GDP or broad household income, with less detail on how abortion restrictions affect unpaid care and employment decisions. Therefore, further research into the effects of restrictive abortion policies on specific burdens, such as how being denied an abortion impacts the number of hours women spend on unpaid domestic care or what economic tradeoffs exist for low-income caregivers when they reduce their work hours or leave their jobs, is necessary.

Understanding abortion access as a core economic issue, rather than only a political or healthcare debate, is necessary for creating effective labor policies. Addressing disparities in the care economy requires evaluating how legal frameworks either empower or limit women's ability to participate fully in the workforce.