Maternity Leave/Abortion Rights a Good Corporate Investment

All the chest beating about "a fertilized egg is a human being" does not engage reality. There has always been an economic calculation about having children. Back when the world was mostly agriculture, each child was an investment which yielded a profit. More hands working in the fields more than paid back the investment of time required to raise them. Big families with some older children helping with younger ones gave a return to the mother for the time she would not work. Children were what economists call "producer goods" like donkeys and hoes. 

As agriculture became mechanized and cities grew, children were no longer a good business investment. They became a "consumer good" competing with other consumer goods. Note in all of this I am not making a judgement, just stating the facts. 

As more women entered the labor force and having a child meant time off and less family income, the cost of a child went up. It continues to rise. Women are now more than 1/2 the labor force. 

When companies needed to attract women employees, a new economic calculation came into play, maternity leave. Here a company pays a woman's wage while she is giving birth and recovers it later in productivity. Hard dollars are involved. Even if the woman takes time off without pay but is taken back as a trained and productive employee after the birth, it is costing the company money to cover her work while she is gone. In both cases the company is investing in an employee with the hope it will be repaid by the woman's productivity.

In these circumstances, it is a smart for a company to avoid pregnancies. That is why some are offering to pay for abortions including the transportation.  

The anti-abortion cult tried to change the economics by offering $10,000 to snitches who reported any source of help to a woman wanting an abortion. Let's take a hypothetical. A right-to-life cult member who works next to a woman whose abortion was paid for by their company. The snitch calls government law enforcement. The company will fire the snitch and will have more money to defend itself than the government has to go forward with the case. The case will be dropped. The snitch will have lost her job and not receive $10,000. The decades-long economics never changes, women with resources will get abortions, poor women will not.

I've read that in Central and South America the inequity of abortion, available to the rich but not to the poor, has been a big political force in making abortions legal.