After Indiana enacted a near-total abortion ban last week, two major Indiana employers warned it will hurt job growth there.
Eli Lilly and Cummins predicted the law will make it harder to attract “scientific, engineering and business talent” to the state, and Eli Lilly said it now plans to grow its workforce “outside our home state.” (Read story here.)
For them, this isn’t political, it’s recognizing that educated professionals, especially women, won’t want to live and work in places like Indiana.
It’s too early to know how prevalent this might become, or how much highly restrictive abortion laws will hurt the economies of the states enacting them, but I strongly suspect they won’t get off scot-free. Mississippi’s reputation as a racist backwater made it the nation’s poorest state.
As Eli Lilly pointed out, Indiana residents don’t agree on abortion. A normally functioning political system accommodates divergent points of view. But rather than compromise, Republicans are enacting extreme abortion laws. Given that, an out-migration of people, businesses, and health care workers from those states wouldn’t be a huge surprise.
Related Story: An Indiana GOP legislator sought to outlaw erectile dysfunction drugs, arguing impotence is “an act of God” (see story here). Will Republicans seek to prohibit other medical treatments, based on their own religious beliefs?