Bernie, the Dems, abortion, and poverty

I saw an article today about why Bernie was wrong for supporting pro-lifer Mello and defending that by saying economics was what mattered and reproductive justice was just a side issue ... Abortion is about economic justice.

Here's an article by Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, on that same issue ...

An anti-poverty agenda that excludes access to reproductive health care is woefully incomplete

[...] Having a child is much more than an economic event, but it’s also very much that, invoking significant direct costs and opportunity costs (and benefits too, of course). Thus, the inability to control such costs due to lack of access to reproductive health care is a potentially poverty-inducing problem for low-income women and their families (and 69 percent of those who seek abortions are low-income). Conversely, increasing use of the birth control pill, for example, has been found to significantly reduce the gender pay gap.

I was particularly struck by the findings from a research project in progress called the Turnaway Study .... A key finding from the Turnaway Study in the economic security space is that relative to women who were able to get the abortion they sought, women denied an abortion had three times the odds of being poor. A year after they were turned away, these women were 10 percent less likely to be working full-time (58 versus 48 percent), and 76 percent of them received public assistance, compared to 44 percent of women who were able to access abortion.

- Source: What the War on Reproductive Rights Has to do With Poverty and Race

There's more I could cite, but the point is that reproductive rights for women is not some unimportant side issue that can be optional if you really do care about poverty and economic justice.