November 18, 2023

You’ve undoubtedly heard that Republicans have found themselves, as Caroline Vakil relates over at The Hill, in “political quicksand when it comes to abortion,” evidenced by underwhelming performances at the polls since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

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The end of Roe was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, say both forlorn conservative squishes and giddy leftist pundits.  The suggestion by both is that Republicans underestimated Americans’ appetite for laws allowing babies to be slaughtered in the womb by the tens of thousands each year.  The most recent example cited for this crisis in the pro-life movement is the popular ballot initiative in Ohio that legislated a right to abortion at the state level.

Among these voices is Jon A. Shields at The Atlantic.  He suggests that “abortion foes” dreamed that the end of Roe would pave the path to a “more pro-life America,” but “that’s not how things are panning out.”  He contends that as soon as Roe was overturned, “voters turned against the pro-life cause everywhere they could, resulting in even some red states legalizing protections for abortion.”  He further suggests as evidence that Republican presidential candidates who “might have pressed for sweeping abortion restrictions” in previous cycles are instead “advocating for a 15-week limit, a policy that would protect the large majority of abortions.”

Is it true that we do not live in a more “pro-life America” today than we did prior to the overturning of Roe?  It’s hard to say, and it very much seems to depend on where you live.  For example, in the six months after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overruled Roe, the monthly tally of abortions had fallen nationally by six percent, from roughly 82,000 to 77,000.  One year after the decision, however, the abortion reporting effort called #WeCount found that there was actually an increase in monthly abortions after Dobbs, from 82,115 per month before Dobbs to 82,298 per month in the year that followed.

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In #WeCount’s findings, not only is it apparent that abortion drastically decreased in states with limitations while the number of abortions increased substantially in states like California and Florida, but the data show that there were 10,000+ more abortions than the monthly average that were recorded in March of 2023.  This is a curious spike in the data that skews the results dramatically.  For example, if we remove these 10,000 abortions from the annualized number of abortions, it yields 977,576 abortions in the year after Roe was overturned, which is 81,465 per month — a marked reduction from the pre-Roe sample monthly average.

With regard to the question as why this anomaly occurred, the answer is almost certainly the phenomenon known as “abortion tourism.”  Almost immediately after the Supreme Court handed the decisions on abortion back to the individual states rather than the federal government, corporate leviathans began incentivizing employees in states where abortion was curtailed to get pregnant and abort their children as an annual vacation package. 

Why corporations might do such a thing is no mystery.  As Becket Adams writes at The Washington Examiner:

If you wrote a dystopian thriller about a world where multibillion-dollar corporations subsidize abortion to keep female employees on the clock and avoid paying increased insurance premiums, a good editor would send it back and say, “This is too on the nose.”

When companies like Amazon began offering their recent college grad employees “up to $4,000 in travel expenses annually for non-life-threatening medical treatments including abortions,” it represented a direct incentive to young women.  We shouldn’t be mystified as to how or why several thousand young women flocked in 2023 to Florida for abortions, a state which saw the “third most abortions overall” and “the second largest increase” in the wake of Dobbs — and in March of 2023, there were 9,020 abortions in Florida, 3,020 more than the pre-Roe average of 6,000 per month.

Indeed, you don’t have to be a sleuth or an avid reader of dystopian fiction to calculatewhy several thousand young women, likely unhappy in their jobs and struggling to get by as young, single earners, might take advantage of a financial incentive to go to Florida in the month of March.  And hey, for the company employing them, paying for a Panama City vacation for a few days is certainly a cheaper proposition than delivery costs of a child in the hospital and the required maternity leave.