“I was horrified.”
Utah State Representative Angela Romero had long known that if the supreme court ruled to overturn Roe v Wade, her state’s trigger law would come into effect and elective abortions would quickly be banned. But, even armed with that knowledge she still couldn’t believe that scenario had become reality.
The district Romero represents sits on the west side of Salt Lake City, an area that stands in stark economic and cultural contrast to the predominantly white, wealthy suburbs on the city’s east side.
With access to abortion newly restricted, Romero was “especially concerned about marginalized communities, communities of color, and this forcing them to stay in poverty”, she said at her office in Salt Lake City on Tuesday afternoon.
“We’re always cutting social services as a state,” she said. “How are people supposed to get out of poverty if they don’t get the support they need? We don’t do that as a state already.”
Utah already put up hurdles for people to get abortions, with an informed consent law that required people wanting an abortion to go through a 72-hour waiting period and complete an education module.
The state was one of several with so-called trigger laws, which banned elective abortions shortly after the supreme court ruled to overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June. The implementation of Utah’s law, SB 174, is temporarily blocked, after a judge granted a 14-day restraining order following a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Utah. On Monday, a judge will rule if the trigger law violates the state’s constitution. In the meantime a different state law, HB 136, went into effect, banning abortions after 18 weeks.
The new abortion restrictions will widen Utah’s already dire economic gender and racial disparities, argue legislators, economists and women in the state.
Utah women live in poverty at a lower rate than the national average, according to Utah Women and Leadership Project (UWLP) research. But a more granular look reveals women of color are having a very different experience in the Beehive State economy. Nearly 34% of Black women, 27.5% of Native American women, 18.5% of Latina women, 14.1% of Asian women, and 11.8% of Pacific Islander women in the state live in poverty.
Single mothers of all demographic backgrounds have it the hardest, according to UWLP data, with more than 35% of single mothers with children under five living in poverty.
Utah women make about 30% less than men, one of the biggest gender wage gaps in the country.
Making ends meet is a struggle Romero knows all too well. Before she was a legislator, Romero became a single mother at 23. She had a strong support system that many people don’t, she said. She took out loans, lived in public housing and earned a master’s degree. It took her until four or five years ago to pay off the debt she incurred.
“Will individuals [who are now denied abortions] have access to daycare for children? Healthcare for children? Will they be able to pay rent? What kind of resources are we going to have available once the child is born? What are we doing to prevent families from becoming homeless?” she asked.
Poverty booms and credit dives
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit research organization, calculated in 2020 that women who were turned away and unable to get abortions had 80% increase in negative credit events. The same women experienced unpaid debts, lingering and growing in size, evictions, and bankruptcies with negative events up to four years after their child was born.
Whether or not to have a child is the “most economically consequential decision” a woman makes in her lifetime, said Caitlyn M K Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, who has spent the past 15 years studying the causal effects of reproductive policy.
Abortion bans, Myers argued, open up a “financial gulf” between women who are able to obtain abortions and those who are denied them.
“When bans go into effect, women with means are still going to find a way and they’re going to travel to other states,” she said. “It’s the women who are the poorest and most vulnerable who can’t get out, who can’t get away to travel hundreds of miles to find a provider. They’re the ones whose lives are going to be economically impacted for the long-term.”
About a quarter of women in states with abortion bans won’t be able to travel to other states, Myers said, adding that that group of women is disproportionately young, disproportionally poor, and of disproportionally women of color.
“It’s an inequality story,” she said.
Chloe Sokol, 19, learned she was pregnant while on birth control shortly before Roe v Wade was overturned, she said. She saved up $450, drove to Salt Lake, and got an abortion.
Sokol lives paycheck to paycheck and dreams of becoming a tattoo artist, which requires a long apprenticeship. Her boyfriend already works long hours.
“It would have definitely been a really grueling process,” she said about having to continue with an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy.
“I know that if we have kids, we want to give our kids the best life. I would hate to have a child and not have money, especially with inflation and the baby formula shortage, especially at my stage of life.”
Worries over unpaid debt
Candida Duran Tavera, 30, borrowed money to have her own abortion in 2014. She was in a relationship at the time. She and her partner used condoms, but it wasn’t 100% effective. She could barely afford her $200 a month rent, let alone the costs of raising a child.
Three years later, married and wanting a child, she gave birth to a daughter who was born with complications. Her daughter is now four, and Taveras says she’s still paying off the medical debt.
Now a doula, Tavera provides emotional support to women going through childbirth and abortions and also works for Planned Parenthood, though she is not speaking on behalf of the organization. Women who are being forced to give birth might not have the financial capacity to pay their medical bills, she said. “They’re going to get into more debt,” she said, adding that would hurt their credit, their ability to rent a house or buy a car, she added.
“The people who I am working with are people who are heavily policed and heavily discriminated against,” she continued, adding that the healthcare system was not set up for Black and brown bodies even before the supreme court’s June ruling.
She pointed to the sharp disparities in maternal health outcomes in the US, and the rise in maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. Data by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, a significant increase from 2019. “It’s safer for women of color to get an abortion than go through childbirth,” she said.
“They really fucked us over intentionally. It was malicious,” she said about Utah’s trigger law.
Utah State Senator Luz Escamilla is equally blunt about the outcome of the end of elective abortions in Utah. “Women are going to die,” she said.
Escamilla argues the new laws will result in less medical care for the poor, the working poor and underinsured. She thinks there will be more aggressive, intrusive policies introduced in the upcoming legislative session.
“This will have a chilling effect on everything that’s reproductive health. Beyond just abortion,” she added. “As we are heading into a recession, how scary that is!”
Escamilla sits on the state’s Women in the Economy Commission. For the past couple of years, the commission has been studying why so many Utah women entered higher education and then left, entered the workforce and then left. The main reason, the commission found, was a lack of access to affordable childcare.
A lot of employment decisions Utah women make involve healthcare considerations, Escamilla said. The state’s attempt to ban all elective abortions after the supreme court decision has made many women in Utah, especially young women, feel like second-class citizens, she said.
“It’s not going to change until you get more women elected,” she argued. “Suddenly now this is real.”
