What Is the Economic Impact of Dobbs?

To do a wash, the typical late 19th century woman had to boil the water, use her scrub board, wring out the water, hang up the clothes, and carry out the dirty water. For four children, she would have washed 40,000 diapers. During one week, doing the family wash occupied 7 hours.

Rather like the wash limited women’s productivity elsewhere, so too has the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. As active labor market participants, close to 24 million women, ages 25-54, live in states that responded to the Dobbs decision with restrictive abortion policies.

It affected women’s labor participation.

Dobbs Economic Impact

Starting generally, we can say that larger states with higher per capita output (GDP) tend to have abortion protection. By contrast, less affluent states restricted abortion access.

Below, you can see the patterns:

More precisely, the darker purple states with low per capita GDPs, except for New Mexico and Montana, ban abortion access:

And it’s minority groups that are potentially hardest hit:

Then, flipping our perspective, more affluent states tend to protect abortion access:

Our Bottom Line: Labor Participation Rates

As a final step, we can ask about the impact of abortion on labor participation rates. We have recent data from IWPR and also the Turnaway Study’s multi-year statistics from the University of California, San Francisco.

Comparing 2022 to 2023, the IWPR concluded that states with abortion bans had a sharper drop in female employment growth.  13 of the states with abortion bans had labor force participation rates below the national average.

Then according to Professor Diana Greene Forster, a lead researcher in the landmark Turnaway abortion impact study, women that had been denied an abortion were less likely to be a full-time worker than others that had received one. Furthermore, the gap remained four years after the denied abortion.

Participation Rates

Mathematically, the participation rate compares everyone that could be in the labor force to those that are actually in it. Since the US labor force is composed of people 16 and over who are gainfully employed or unemployed and looking for a job, if you are 16 and over, unemployed, and not looking for a job, then you are not participating in the labor force.

Below you can see that women’s participation rates have massively grown:

At this point, we wind up with a worrisome summary (below) that returns us to the minority groups (above) whose participation rates are hardest hit:

My sources and more: Always a knowledgeable source for women’s issues, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) explored the Dobbs impact. Next, the Turnaway Study was the ideal complement as was this NBER paper. Then, just before the Dobbs decision, econlife first focused on the economic impact of abortion. But my favorite still for gender issues is Stanley Lebergott’s Pursuing Happiness  because of its facts about the history of household technology.

Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.