Chuck Winder (photo, left; profile here) is a prominent Idaho GOP politician and real estate broker.
Not long ago he said, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers, we don’t have enough of this, we don’t have enough people to do this. Well, I think there’s a reason, it’s not just low birth rate. It is the number of abortions that have occurred.”
That drew this retort from an Idaho Democratic legislator: “I’m very surprised to hear Senator Winder say that forced pregnancy is a way to solve our workforce woes,” The Nation says (read article here).
She was being facetious. It’s hardly a secret why Republicans want more births, and don’t want it to be a choice.
Many years ago an article by Conceptual Guerilla argued that all conservative politics can be explained in terms of ensuring a steady and adequate supply of “cheap labor” (read it here). Not labor per se, but “cheap” (i.e., low paid) labor.
Today “cheap labor conservatism” is manifested in the GOP push to ban abortion and contraception, relax child labor laws, and oppose gay rights. All of this ties into labor supply; and specifically, the “cheap labor” they need to fatten the profits going to their own pockets.
America’s economic history is rife with labor exploitation: Slavery, harsh working conditions at low pay, fierce resistance to labor unions, abuses like company stores, and huge income and wealth disparities between the capitalist and working classes. Women were kept in their place, and expected to bear lots of children.
Abortion and contraception liberated women from mandatory childbearing and freed them to pursue careers. These were historic social changes with large economic impacts. The Nation says,
“To understand the conservative fervor around abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ rights, we have to understand the impact these relatively new rights have on the labor market.”
A falling birth rate obviously limits labor supply. Gay couples don’t procreate new workers. Career women have fewer or no children. All of this threatens the existence of an oversupply of labor that allows employers to keep wages low and work employees harder.
But it’s more nuanced than just that. Early parenthood, and feeding many mouths, “has historically led many teens into low-wage jobs—often locking them into a lifetime of such work.” Childless young people are free to pursue education, drying up part of the cheap labor supply, and can be choosier about the jobs they’ll accept, putting pressure on wages and working conditions. The Nation says,
“Both transformations are good news for the individuals involved, giving them access to more education and better jobs. But they’re less welcome to employers or state legislators counting on parental desperation to introduce young people into low-wage work and then hold them there for decades, in order to bring in profits ….”
If you really want to understand someone’s motives, first look at the results of what they advocate. The Nation continues,
“Though advocates don’t describe them this way, anti-abortion policies clearly aim to push women both into more unplanned pregnancies and down the ladder of civic power. Likewise, anti-gay and anti-transgender policies aim to push the growing group of young people who identify as LGBTQ back into … heterosexual relationships and more pregnancies …. planned and unplanned.”
These policies aim to keep the pool of low-wage workers full. “Family values” has nothing to do with it. Many of these children will grow up unsupervised, because their parents work and can’t afford child care, and in poverty.
If Republicans cared about the working poor they wouldn’t oppose Medicaid, child care assistance, free school lunches, minimum wage increases, and everything else that helps them. The only value these kids have to them is cheap labor. They even want to relax child labor laws so they can get their hands on them sooner.
It’s now a fact, not in the future, that America’s birth rate is below the “replacement rate” and the economy has a chronic labor shortage. The labor shortfall could be filled with immigration, but Republicans have various reasons to oppose that. Instead their political efforts are directed at pushing up the birth rate.
Not by choice; women are to have or no say in it. That’s why the GOP deserves to be called the “forced birth party.” A proper response is: Where do they get off ordering other people to have children? It’s none of their business.