Legalization of abortion has changed the lives of Americans – Constance Shehan

With the famous Roe v. Wade ruling, on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court recognized a fundamental level of reproductive freedom, affirming the right to terminate a pregnancy under certain conditions.

Here’s how that historic ruling has impacted women’s educational and career opportunities over the past 45 years.

Let’s go back to 1970, three years before the ruling on the Roe case.

In that year, the average age for women in the United States at the time of their first marriage was just under 21. Twenty-five percent of high school graduates between 18 and 24 were college-educated, and about 9 percent of adult women had completed four years of college.

Pregnancy was still closely linked to marriage. Those who conceived before marriage were likely to marry before childbirth. For married women with small children under the age of six, it was not yet usual to have a job; about 37 percent of them were part of the workforce. Then, as now, finding satisfactory childcare was a challenge for working mothers.

By 1980 the average age of marriage had risen to 22. Thirty percent of American women between the ages of 18 and 24 who graduated from high school were enrolled in college, and 13.6 percent had completed a four-year college course. 45 percent of married mothers with young children were part of the workforce.

While these changes may not be directly attributable to the Roe v. Wade ruling, they occurred shortly after the supreme court ruling and have continued relentlessly ever since.

Today, roughly two generations after that pronouncement, women postpone marriage, marrying for the first time on average at the age of 27. 17 percent of women over 25 have never been married. Some estimates suggest that 25 percent of today’s young adults may never marry

Furthermore, most college students today are women, and participation in the paid workforce is an integral part of many women’s lives.

If the Roe v. Wade ruling were overturned – by reducing or eliminating women’s control over their reproductive lives altogether – would the average age at marriage, the level of education and the participation of women in the workforce again decrease?

Teens at risk
Even these questions are difficult to answer. But we can see for example the effect that teenage pregnancies have on a woman’s education. Thirty percent of all school leavers cite pregnancy and parenting as a top motivator. Only 40 percent of teenage mothers finish high school. Less than 2 percent finish college by age 30.

The level of education in turn affects the income of teenage mothers for the rest of their lives. Two-thirds of families made up of teenage parents are poor, and about one in four will depend on social assistance within three years of their child’s birth. Many children will not escape this spiral of poverty. Only about two-thirds of children born to teenage mothers earn a high school diploma, compared with 81 percent of their peers with older parents.

The future largely depends on state and federal efforts to protect or restrict access to contraception and abortion. Persistent opposition to the legalization of abortion has succeeded in progressively restricting women’s access to these services. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that studies reproductive policies, between 2011 and mid-2016, state lawmakers enacted 334 restrictions on the right to abortion, about 30 percent of all restrictions on abortion. abortion issued after the Roe v. Wade ruling.

How would the lives of American women have developed in the last decades of the twentieth century and this early twenty-first century if the court had made a different decision in the Roe v. Wade case? Would women be forced into forced pregnancies and denied the opportunity to make life plans that prioritized school and work goals? Would motherhood and marriage be the primary or exclusive roles of women of childbearing age?

With the availability of a wider range of contraceptive and abortive drugs other than medical procedures available today, as well as a strong demand for female jobs in the U.S. economy, it seems unlikely that women’s status will ever return to a situation like the one before 1973. But Americans must not forget the role that the Roe v. Wade ruling played in advancing women’s lives.

(Translation by Francesco De Lellis)