Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Economics and
the History of Economic Thought
[Please share.]
With the support of History of Economic Society and the Masters program in the Theory and History of Economics at the University of Lyon 2, we are hosting a series of webinars that bring together historians of economic thought, applied economists, demographers, and political and critical theorists to consider the economics of reproductive rights in contemporary and historical context around the world. The discussion of rights to safe and legal abortion was recently reopened in Kenya, India, Brazil, Macedonia, Russia, South Korea, and Poland. In the United States, the recent Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is likely to have profound implications for women’s health and socioeconomic opportunities. As economists writing on behalf of Jackson Women’s Health argued, “there is a substantial body of well-developed and credible research that shows that abortion legalization and access in the United States has had – and continues to have – a significant effect on birth rates as well as broad downstream social and economic effects, including on women’s educational attainment and job opportunities.” Those cited include Claudia Goldin, Francine Blau, Jonathan Gruber, and Joshua Angrist.
Linking reproductive rights to economic well-being is not a new phenomenon. The right of choice in childbearing has long been understood to contribute to women’s economic independence (Wollstonecraft 1798; J.S. Mill 1869; Wicksell 1880; Perkins Gilman 1898) and family limitation was also viewed as a component of improved living standards (Marshall 1890; Pareto 1896). Contemporary studies evince what was well understood by earlier economists – that effective family planning, including access to legal abortion, is associated with increased wages, higher family incomes, greater labor force participation rates, and expanded human capital investment (Goldin 1990; Gruber et al. 1999; Kleven et al. 2019; Lindo et al. 2020; Myers 2017; Meyers et al. 2019). It is also important to consider whether and how undermining reproductive rights might compromise the lives of LGBTQ+ people and their families in ways that are different to cisgender women or to heterosexual families.
Building on recent efforts that have revealed the depth and breadth of economic thought on gender disparities in education, labor conditions, pay, and ownership rights (e.g., Becchio 2020; Chassonnery-Zaïgouche and Cot 2021; Madden 2019; Badgett 2020), we seek to encourage dialog on the economics of reproductive rights with the goal of encouraging collaborations between scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds (with a focus on collaborations between historians of economic thought and applied economists). We also hope the webinars will support the development of materials that could be used for teaching special topics courses and seminars.
Organization:
The webinars will be held online at a variety of different times to give the greatest opportunity for public attendance globally. Seminars will be moderated by Miriam Bankovsky (La Trobe University), Rebeca Gomez-Betancourt (University of Lyon 2), and/or Marianne Johnson (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh).
Zoom links will be made available in January.
Schedule of Webinars
January - May 2023
Marianne Johnson, Historian of Economics, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
The Wicksells on Procreation and Population
Monday January 30 at 9am EST (GMT -05). 9am in New York; 15h in Lyon; 2pm in London; 1am (Tues) in Melbourne.
Miriam Bankovsky, Political Theorist and Historian of Economics, La Trobe University
Alfred Marshall Weighs in on the Victorian Family Limitation Debates: Principles for Improved Living Standards and the Politics of “Voluntary Restraint”
Tuesday February 07 at 4am EST (GMT -05). 4am in New York; 10h in Lyon; 9am in London; 8pm in Melbourne.
Caitlin Myers, Economist, Middlebury College
From Roe to Dobbs: 50 years of Abortion Policy and the Economic Research that has Studied it
Wednesday February 15 at 1pm EST (GMT - 05) New York; 19h in Lyon; 6pm in London; 5am in Melbourne.
Mayra Pineda-Torres, Microeconomist, Georgia Institute of Technology
Legal Access to Reproductive Control Technology and Women’s Education: The Economic Impacts of Abortion Access
Friday February 24 at 8am EST (GMT - 05). 8am in New York; 14h in Lyon; 1pm in London; midnight in Melbourne
Jemima Repo, Reader in Political and Feminist Theory, Newcastle University
The Multiple Legacies of Gary Becker’s Economics of Reproduction: Refiguring Reproduction and the Governance of Populations (A Discussion).
Thursday March 02 at 5am EST (GMT - 05). 5am in New York; 11h in Lyon; 10am in London; 9pm in Melbourne.
Edith Kuiper, Feminist Economist, State University of New York at New Paltz
Eugenics, Abortion, and Progressivism
March date to be announced
Melanie Guldi, Economist, University of Central Florida
Legal Access to Abortion and Contraception in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s
Friday March 31 at 12:30pm EST (GMT -05). 12.30pm in New York; 18h in Lyon; 5pm in London; 3am (Sat) in Melbourne
Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Historian of Economics, University of Bologna
Emotion vs. Argument: Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson’s Controversy Over Abortion Rights
April date to be announced
References and Related Works
Becchio, Giandomenica. 2020. A History of Feminist and Gender Economics. New York: Routledge.
Blau, Francine (1998). Trends in the well-being of American Women, 1970–1995. Journal of Economic Literature, 36, 112–165.
Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Cléo. 2019. Is Equal Pay Worth It? In Robert Dimand and Kirsten Madden (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought. New York: Routledge, 129 – 149.
Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Cléo and Annie Cot. 2021. Sentiment and Prejudice: Francis Ysidro Edgeworth on Women’s Wages. History of Political Economy 53(5): 799 – 832.
Davis, Angela. 1982. Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights, in Angela Davis (ed.), Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 202 – 271.
Durand-Vallot, Angeline. 2016. A Historical Approach to the Birth Control Movement in the United States. 10ème Colloque Européen d’Histoire des Sciences Sociales (ESSHC), Université de Vienne, Vienne, Autriche, 23 to 26 April.
Ehrlich, Paul. 1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballentine Books.
Ekerwald, E. 2000. Alva Myrdal: Making the Private Public. Acta Sociologica 43(4): 343-352.
Gilman, Nils. 2017. The Myrdals’ Eugenicist Roots. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 8(1): 133 – 143.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1966 [1898]. Women and Economics. New York: Harper.
Glendon, Mary Ann. 1987. Abortion and Divorce in Western Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence Katz. 2002. The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions. Journal of Political Economy 110(4): 730–770.
Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence Katz. 2000. Career and Marriage in the Age of the Pill. American Economic Review90(2): 461–465.
Gruber, Jonathan, Phillip Levine, and Douglas Staiger. 1999. Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the ‘Marginal Child’? Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(1): 263 – 291.
Kleven, Henrik. 2019. Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations. AEA Papers and Proceedings109(2): 122 – 126.
Levy, David and Sandra Peart. 2005. The Vanity of the Philosopher. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Leonard, Thomas. 2016. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lindo, Jason, Mayra Pineda-Torres, David Pritchard, and Hedieh Tajali. 2020. Legal Access to Reproductive Control Technology, Women’s Education, and Earnings Approaching Retirement. AEA Papers and Proceedings 110(2): 231 – 235.
Madden, Kirsten. 2019. Introduction. In Robert Dimand and Kirsten Madden (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought. New York: Routledge, 1 - 9.
Malthus, Thomas Robert. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson.
Mill, John Stuart. 1869. On the Subjection of Women. London: Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
Montaigne, Maxine. 2016. How Malthusian was the Malthusian League? Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and the Rhetoric of Family Limitation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Britain. Paper presented at The History of Economic Thought Society of Australia Conference. Melbourne, 13-14 July.
Montaigne, Maxine. 2017. The Malthusian and the Anti-Malthusian: The Use of Economic Ideas and Language in the Public Discourse of Nineteenth Century Britain. MPhil Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Moore, Brittany, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Ernestina Coast, Samantha R. Lattof, and Cheri Poss. 2021. History and Scientific Background on the Economics of Abortion, PLOS ONE.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257360
Myers, Caitlin Knowles. 2017, The Power of Abortion Policy: Reexamining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control. Journal of Political Economy 125(6): 2178 – 2224.
Myers, Caitlin, Rachel Jones, and Ushma Upadhyay. 2019. Predicted Changes in Abortion Access and Incidence in a Post-Roe World. Contraception 100(5): 367 – 373.
Myrdal, Alva. 1947. Nation and Family. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Myrdal, Alva and Viola Klein. 1956. Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Myrdal, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. 1934. Kris I Befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question). Stockholm: Bonniers.
https://archive.org/details/MyrdalMyrdal1934KrisIBefolkningsfragan/page/n331/mode/2up
Wicksell, Anna Bugge. 1888. De Praktiske Reformer. Nylænde: Tidsskrift for Kvindernes Sak 2(24): 369 – 374.
Wicksell, Knut. 1979 [1910]. The Theory of Population, Its Composition and Changes (trans. Göran Ohlin). In Steinar Strøm and Bjorn Thalberg (eds.), The Theoretical Contributions of Knut Wicksell. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 122 – 151.
Wicksell, Knut. 1999 [1880]. A Few Remarks on the Chief Cause of Social Misfortunes and the Best Means to Remedy Them, With Particular Reference to Drunkenness. In Bo Sandelin (ed.), Knut Wicksell: Selected Essa ys in Economics, Volume 2. New York: Routledge, 83 – 116.
Wicksell, Knut. 1999 [1914]. Can a Country Become Underpopulated? In Bo Sandelin (ed.), Knut Wicksell: Selected Essays in Economics, Volume 2. New York: Routledge, 125 – 135.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1994 [1898]. Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman. New York: W.W. Norton.