Abortion, Poverty, and Private Property: Lessons from Modern U.S. Economic History
Some Christians Wrongly Argue that Declining Marriage Rates Lead to Poverty and Abortion
Recently deceased Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, is an example of a prominent public Christian intellectual who interpreted poverty as a consequence of deviating from the nuclear family. Colson said in 2010, “Studies have shown that much poverty in the U.S. is sexually driven.” [1] As evidence, he points to a 2004 article by the conservative Heritage Foundation, whose mission is “to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” The Heritage article says, “The collapse of marriage is the principal cause of child poverty in the United States. Children raised by never-married mothers are seven times more likely to live in poverty than children raised by their biological parents in intact marriages.”[2] While this refrain might describe history in a certain way, it is superficial. It uses the nuclear family as a means to validate Locke’s heretical theology of private property. It doesn’t ask deeper questions about which nuclear families had this experience, and why some children must work so much harder than others to escape poverty.
My challenge to Colson and The Heritage Foundation is that they are confusing causes and effects. Colson suggests that poverty is the result of the breakdown of the nuclear family structure. Now, while I can attest personally, as an adult child of divorced parents, that it is more expensive for me to care for aging, divorced parents than if they were married and functional, I also think that the reverse is also true: Family structures are harmed when economic and social conditions are set up in a way that exacerbates wealth inequality. Most importantly, Colson and The Heritage Foundation don’t recognize how escaping poverty is a consequence of government policies and action.
Under Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama, and Trump, U.S. trade policy and corporate executives hollowed out America’s middle class by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, chasing cheaper labor for decades, especially to China. Insecure about their prospects, U.S. men became less likely to marry.[3] I suspect they were not having substantially less sex, though.
People Get Abortions When They Feel Financially Insecure
The abortion rate clearly increases during economic crises. Following the financial crisis of 2008–09, 44 percent of women reported wanting to reduce or delay their childbearing because of their financial uncertainties.[4] Google searches of self-induced abortion jumped.[5] Also, abortion increased during the period 2017 to 2020 at least in part due to economic challenges and the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in March 2020. In 2017, Guttmacher counted 862,320 abortions in 2017 and 930,160 in 2020, up 8 percent.[6] Guttmacher’s methodology does not count self-induced abortions taking place outside of contact with a health professional, a number which is likely to have increased substantially because of the pandemic. The question about economic policy remains quite important. How do Christians evaluate it?
People Are More Likely to Have Kids If They Are Financially Stable
For Christians concerned about reducing – even punishing – premarital sex, and not just abortions, this raises a troubling but important question: What if the fusion of moral conservatism and economic conservatism is self-defeating? What if most people are going to have sex anyway, and the amount of sex in society is basically constant? What if competition and consumption breaks down the bonds of community, leaving people feeling more isolated and alone? What if the work world is so dehumanizing that people feel like having an intimate sexual partner is precisely what humanizes them? What if becoming a parent, even a single parent, is something people do to feel more human? Take that a step further: What if a four-day work week and tethering the janitor’s pay to the CEO’s[7] would allow more people to meaningfully find community and date rather than randomly hook-up? What if single-payer universal health insurance would allow more people to start small businesses and feel more fulfilled? What if the primary effect of social and economic policies around labor, international trade, wages, housing, and so on were to help people feel confident about getting married and being better marriage partners? What if we designed policies so that raising children were more affordable and more joyful?
Consider this: Do married couples ever get divorced because of financial strains? While that’s not the only reason, it stands to reason that alleviating financial strains could help married couples stay married. But is that how we design policies?
Consider this, too: When Dan Price, CEO of credit card processing company Gravity Payments, raised his workers’ minimum wage from $35,000 to $70,000 per year, and reduced his own $1 million salary to accomplish it, it increased the number of babies born or announced among his workers. In August of 2021, six years after Price doubled the starting salary, Price reported, “Our employees had a 10x boom in terms of the number of babies they were having. We went from having between 0 – 2 babies born per year among the entire team, to over 65 born or announced over the last six years.”[8]
Historically, Catholics Addressed Abortion Through New Deal Economic Policies
At the time of the Great Depression, Roman Catholics were alarmed to see the abortion rate spike; Protestants largely ignored it. At that time, poverty clearly contributed to abortion, because who brings children into the world when they have no hope? That is one reason why Catholics were largely New Deal Democrats who were comfortable using the federal government to make structural changes to the economy. They favored labor unions, built consumer protections especially from indebtedness, established a minimum wage, wanted to use federal spending to back mortgages and housing development, and build strong social safety nets like Social Security and unemployment.
U.S. Economic and Military Policies Have Privileged Certain Groups Over Others
Throughout the twentieth century, the federal government deployed billions of taxpayer dollars to develop American companies and then protect them from foreign competition: infrastructure, automotive, aircraft, fossil fuel, electronics, high tech, biotech, and pharmaceuticals. All this constituted a wealth transfer to white America: an affirmative action program through corporate jobs that favored men. Now that other countries are catching up with the U.S. in manufacturing, technology, and other economic strengths, and U.S. banks and corporations are looking elsewhere to bleed other people dry of land, labor, and health, what happens next?
Favoritism in Policy Built Generational Wealth for Some
Moreover, at pivotal moments, the U.S. government gave land, education, home loans, and jobs to its white male citizens to help them build up generational wealth. For example, the federal government used the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1867 to give previously Native American lands to white settlers, stripping Native Americans of their ancestral lands and forcibly relocating them, which broke their ties to land, altered their cultures, and strained their family bonds. Then, the federal government built land-grant colleges to help educate those white settlers in agriculture and mining[9] while using credit via USDA to discriminate in favor of white farmers but not black which resulted in 98 percent of black farmers being dispossessed.[10] In the real estate developers’ and realtors’ use of race-based covenant agreements to the New Deal’s Federal Housing Authority and the G.I. Bill, African Americans and other minorities were denied home loans and were victims of realtor-organized and then government-led, race-based redlining until 1968, at which point they also became vulnerable to predatory lending and illegal redlining. Women of all races faced legal discrimination getting a home mortgage and could not get one on their own until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974.
Once this affirmative action program for certain white men-headed families was inscribed across the nation’s real estate patterns, the inequality began to perpetuate itself. Public education funding was based on property taxes, and still is to a large extent, so our children have very unequal educational opportunities.[11] People experience police very differently by zip code—when they step outside their door,[12] when they receive a wellness visit,[13] or even while they sit on their couch eating ice cream[14]—in ways that are hardly “fair.” The tax code continues to favor homeowners and penalize renters, exacerbating inequality.[15] So do zoning laws. People experience the police very differently based on their zip code. And so on.
Starting from the late 1970s, when foreclosures in black communities first began to rise, to the 2008–09 financial crisis, bank lenders issued predatory loans betting that homebuyers would default on their mortgages.[16] The financial crisis of 2008–09 disproportionately devastated black and brown homeownership and wealth, but touched everyone.[17]
White (median household) || Black (median household)
2005 $134,992 || $12,124
2009 $113,149 || $5,677
We are now seeing more American citizens squeezed by this economic philosophy which originated in the strategic use of money-as-property, used as loans in the service of white supremacy. The Federal Reserve Bank’s quantitative easing policy from 2009 kept housing prices artificially inflated, rewarding boomer homeowners but penalizing asset-poor, already indebted millenials.[18]
Moreover, the U.S. housing market is, in principle, an international market at the expense of American citizens. From 2010 on, Chinese businessmen, investors from Canada, the U.K., Mexico, and India, and oil oligarchs from Russia and Saudi Arabia purchased real estate in the U.S. with cash—often with the very dollars that the U.S. Treasury used to repay its own debt to them, with interest. They further overheat the housing market, placing home ownership further out of reach for the average American while foreigners pay for houses in lump sums.[19] In the U.S., bankers and capital investors like Blackrock learned to prey on black people. Now they simply prey on everyone, and invite their foreign counterparts to do the same. Even conservative commentator David Brooks looks at how we need more multi-family “gentle density” housing, to live in extended family units, and better public transportation systems so we are not sitting for hours in traffic burning fossil fuels; he concludes, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”[20]
Americans Escaped Poverty Through Government Policies
That is a brief sketch of the historical policy counterargument to the view about poverty espoused by Colson and The Heritage Foundation. Some Americans escaped poverty not through the nuclear family per se, but through the design of government policies. And that continues to be relevant today. Plenty of married couples feel squeezed by an economy that is now quite predatory. So, will we continue believing that “individual meritocracy” is how the U.S. became “great”? Is that how individual Americans, or American families, became financially stable? Or will we acknowledge that public-private partnerships have always been central to American economic growth? We need them now more than ever before to spread opportunity.
After all, the Fourteenth Amendment demands that government programs reflect “equal treatment under the law.” But when we consider the full scope of what U.S. law has accomplished, both positively and negatively, how could we say that people and communities have received “equal treatment”? We need to tell the truth about U.S. economic history; we do not need lies.
How God Cares for Children in Jubilee and the Teaching of Jesus
In addition, there is a theological argument against Colson and The Heritage Foundation. Children do not choose their parents, and have done nothing to deserve the advantages or disadvantages that they inherit from their parents and grandparents. Thus, in Jewish law, God claimed all the Israelites as His children, and implemented the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25, where He pushed an economic reset-button with regards to the family-land distribution. Every fifty years, God in effect brought the Israelites back into the garden land as if for the first time. He re-gifted them their family-land inheritance regardless of the ways that Israelites had gained or lost land through famine, tenancy, servitude, or family carelessness. God also declared that in the new covenant, children would not suffer for the sins of their parents in a theological sense (Ezekiel 16). Under the Sinai covenant, when God sent a generation of parents into exile, the children and grandchildren suffered, too (e.g. Numbers 13 – 14). So why do we insist on making children suffer for their parents’ mistakes and misfortunes?
Jesus’ Vision of Caring for Other People’s Children
Jesus even reconfigured the Israelite sense of “family” to reflect God’s ever-growing and outward-oriented family. Jesus cared about the loving union between husband and wife as a witness to the loving union between himself and his church, but not as a means to show how private property can be accumulated for one’s own biological children. Instead, Jesus focused our attention to the day he will return and share God’s garden planet with all God’s children (Rom 8:18–25). He transformed Israel’s “people on the land” experience to a “people around the table” experience with regards to wealth and community (Luke 6:21–49; 12:13–34; 14:7–35; 15:1–32; 16:19–31; 18:15–19:10), complete with regular story-telling around a meal (Luke 24:13–30; 1 Cor 11:17–24) with constant invitations to others.
In January 2022, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (R-WY), demonstrated exactly the opposite attitude towards “other people’s children.” He said, “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children.”[21] He said he did not support the child tax credit, which was expanded in 2021 to offer $3,600 per child; he opposed Biden’s effort to help families find childcare options; he wanted to slash unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic to pressure people to get back to work. Jesus has precisely the opposite view. To call and gather people into God’s family, Jesus welcomed “children” – both biological and spiritual children – and challenged those people who were not willing to give to other people’s children. The double story told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke of the children, followed by the rich ruler (Matt 19:13–30; Mark 10:13–31; Luke 18:15–30), demonstrates Jesus’ mission to all, and his challenge to us.
Economic Generosity Is Just as Much a Heart Issue as Marital Faithfulness Is
Jesus believed that “hardness of heart” held Israel back from even more economic generosity, not just faithfulness in marriage (Matt 19:3 – 12; Mark 10:1 – 12). Matthew alone uses the word “regeneration” (palingenesia) in his account of the rich young ruler (Matt 19:28; cf. Mark 10:13–31, Luke 18:15–30). The word “regeneration” refers to Jesus restoring “softness of heart” to human beings. Jesus is restoring human nature and human relationships back to the design God intended originally in the first “generation,” the creation in Genesis. Jesus tied the “regeneration” to his enthronement: the time when “the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne” and the apostles will “sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt 19:28). Jesus connected his enthronement and the “regeneration” to his resurrection when God gave him Adamic “authority over all things in heaven and earth” (Matt 28:16–20).
Jesus and Paul Call Us Towards Economic Equality in the Waiting-in-the-Wilderness Story
Thus, the apostle Paul envisioned the far-flung church as one community journeying through a “wilderness period” together, relying on God’s provision, waiting for a “new garden land” when Jesus returns (2 Cor 8–9). He concretely believed that the Gentile Christians should share resources with the poverty-stricken Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and Judea. He reasoned, for one, that all Christians are informed by Jesus as exemplar—Jesus, who “though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Paul also reasoned that all Christians live in a period of God’s timeline akin to biblical Israel’s time in the wilderness, when God gave provision roughly equally to all His people, and all received a daily share of manna. Paul said:
“For this is not for the ease of others and for your affliction, but by way of equality—at this present time your abundance being a supply for their need, so that their abundance also may become a supply for your need, that there may be equality; as it is written, “He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little had no lack.”” (2 Cor 8:13–15, quoting Exod 16:18)
In other words, Paul reminds Christians that God is generous, too, and will richly provide for their needs (not all their wants or wishes) (2 Cor 8:10–15). Of course, this means working and sharing as opposed to stealing (Eph 4:28) or being outright lazy (2 Thess 3:10–13). It is absolutely true that the biblical writers look at one’s job as one’s way of earning a living and contributing to a community. But it is also absolutely true that they look at jobs as gifts, given to them, so people could participate in their community and feel their contributions were welcomed. The apostle’s quotation from the manna story in Exodus seems quite strategic: God gave manna to Israel to provide their daily needs, for people to gather as well as eat, as we wait for God to bring us into His new garden land when Jesus returns (1 Cor 11:17–24).
Embodying God’s Love to All Children
As God invites everyone to become His adopted children in Christ (John 1:12; 3:16–21), why would Christians not work towards an economic vision where every human child is honored not just in the womb, but through their whole lives? Can we tilt our economic and social system so that a home and a job might be things people have to work to stay in, sure—but to start, what if a home and a job and a healthy planet are gifts to every child by the community at large? Can Christians build a society so that each child might taste as a small gift what God gifts in full? How might Christians contribute to a Christian-influenced gift economy to all children, that limits intergenerational harm inflicted by inequality, not just a Lockean reward economy where massive intergenerational harms are passed down to innocent children and struggling parents?
[1] Charles W. Colson, “Morality, Poverty, and Evangelicals,” The Christian Post, March 18, 2010; https://www.christianpost.com/news/morality-poverty-and-evangelicals.html.
[2] Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue, “Understanding the President’s Healthy Marriage Initiative,” The Heritage Foundation, March 26, 2004; https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/understanding-the-presidents-healthy-marriage-initiative.
[3] Autor et al., “When Work Disappears”
[4] Guttmacher Institute, “A Real-Time Look.”
[5] Stephens-Davidowitz, “Return.”
[6] Jennifer Haberkorn and Emily Alpert Reyes, “U.S. Abortion Rate Rises, Reversing Three Decades of Declines,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2022; https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-06-14/u-s-abortion-rate-rises-reversing-three-decades-of-declines.
[8] Zahra Tayeb, “After this CEO raised his company's minimum wage to $70,000, he said the number of babies born to staff each year grew 10-fold and revenue soared,” Business Insider, August 8, 2021; https://www.businessinsider.com/gravity-payments-dan-price-ceo-raise-minimum-wage-revenue-2021-8.
[9] National Board of Agriculture et al., Colleges of Agriculture, 1.
[10] Newkirk, “Great Land Robbery.”
[11] Spatig-Amerikaner, “Unequal Education.” Illing, “Schools.” The Takeaway, “State Education.” Some States have recognized that their public school systems have so much inequality that they violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. See Harris, “Judge, Citing Inequality,” who notes, “The current system “has left rich school districts to flourish and poor school districts to flounder,” Judge Moukawsher said, betraying a promise in the State Constitution to give children a “fair opportunity for an elementary and secondary school education… Bridgeport… has nearly eight times the population of nearby New Canaan, [where] property… is worth more than $1 billion more.” New York faced a similar lawsuit in 2006, Kansas in 2016. Michigan has debated the problem.
[12] Edwards et al., “Risk of Being Killed,” finds that African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. See Mock, “What New Research Says.”
[13] Tatum, “Fort Worth Police.”
[14] Martinez and Fernandez, “Trial Opens.”
[16] Taylor, Race for Profit.
[17] Bouie, “Crisis,” observes, “In 2005, three years before the Great Recession, the median black household had a net worth of $12,124. Yes, this was far behind the median white household—which had a net worth of $134,992—but it was a huge improvement from previous decades, in which housing discrimination made wealth accumulation difficult (if not impossible) for the large majority of African-American families. By the official end of the recession in 2009, median household net worth for blacks had fallen to $5,677—a generation’s worth of hard work and progress wiped out. (The number for whites, by comparison, was $113,149.) Overall, from 2007 to 2010, wealth for blacks declined by an average of 31 percent, home equity by an average of 28 percent, and retirement savings by an average of 35 percent. By contrast, whites lost 11 percent in wealth, lost 24 percent in home equity, and gained 9 percent in retirement savings. According to a 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University, “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession.”“
[18] Shedlock, “Ben Bernanke” summarizes an article by McWilliams, “Quantitative Easing,” writing, “Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s “cash for trash” QE scheme drove up asset prices and bailed out the baby boomers. The cost of course, was pricing millennials out of the housing market. Unorthodox policy penalizes the asset poor. What assets do millennials have? Hardly any. Instead they are saddled with mountains of student debt which, thanks to president George W. Bush, could no longer be discharged in bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 would have better been called the Debt Slave Act of 2005. Then, when the Great Financial Crisis hit, the Fed came along bailed out the banks, bailed out the bondholders, bailed out Fannie Mae, and bailed out the asset holders in general, leaving millennials mired in debt unable to afford a house.”
[19] Absolutely reliable data is hard to come by, as money sources can be disguised, but as of 2014, foreigners purchased 35 percent of all American real estate purchases, spending roughly $92.2 billion. In 2017, even despite a strong dollar, foreigners bought real estate in the U.S. at record levels: $153 billion of real estate, an increase of 49 percent over the previous year. See Kenneth Rapoza, “These Are The Foreigners Buying Up American Real Estate,” Forbes, July 10, 2014; https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2014/07/10/these-are-the-foreigners-buying-up-american-real-estate/#656b48f43876. See also Diana Olick, “Foreigners Snap Up Record Number of US Homes,” CNBC, July 18, 2017; https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/foreigners-snap-up-record-number-of-us-homes.html.
[20] Brooks, “Nuclear Family.”
[21] Cheryl Teh, “Sen. Ron Johnson says it's not 'society's responsibility' to care for 'other people's children' while arguing against childcare subsidies for working parents,” Business Insider, January 27, 2022; https://www.businessinsider.com/ron-johnson-not-societys-responsibility-care-for-other-peoples-children-2022-1.