Women's Reproductive Rights are 'Real' Economic Issues, Opinion Piece Argues

September 19, 2012 — "[A]s almost any woman could tell you, the [conservative] narrative splitting reproductive issues from the 'real' issues of jobs and the economy does not square with the actual lives of women," Christine Adams, an author and professor of history at St. Mary's College of Maryland, writes in a Baltimore Sun opinion piece. She asks, "What is more real for most women than the ability to control reproduction and to protect their sexual health?"

Adams continues, "Even when [economic] times are good, a woman who faces multiple unwanted pregnancies during her child-bearing years has little time to appreciate the security that a burgeoning economy with good jobs promise." She notes, "There is no factor that more strongly correlates with rising educational attainment and economic advancement among women than the new availability of birth control in the 1960s, along with access to safe and legal abortions since the 1960s and 1970s."

Women cannot attain the same rights as men "without the ability to control when and if we bear children, and without the medical care that makes that possible," Adams writes. She concludes, "Without that control over our own bodies, we are no longer genuine rights-bearing individuals," which is an argument that those who claim "to celebrate individualism ... should understand" (Adams, Baltimore Sun, 9/17).