BYE, BYE BABY!
In 2025, the most intimate decision a woman can make still attracts the loudest chorus of strangers. We swipe, we date, we sometimes endure sexual assault, and—statistics remind us—we get pregnant when we do not intend to. For single women, that risk is almost entirely ours to carry. Roughly nine in ten abortions in the United States are obtained by unmarried patients, proof that contraception failures, coercion, and violence land hardest on those who face pregnancy alone. Yet the patchwork of state laws that has emerged since Dobbs v. Jackson treats an unexpected pregnancy as a moral lesson rather than an avoidable economic and health crisis.
Anti-abortion leaders love to wave the adoption flag, but pregnancy is not a paperwork transaction; it is nine months of medical risk followed by a recovery that can stretch well past a year. Obstetricians define the physical postpartum period as six to eight weeks—the time it takes for stitches to dissolve—while hormones, pelvic-floor injuries, and mental health can require many months, sometimes years, to stabilize. Adoption also demands prenatal vitamins, copays, unpaid leave, and postpartum checkups. It is not a cost-free detour. The notion that a woman can simply “carry to term and hand the baby over” glosses over the physical, psychological, and financial toll that no adoption decree can erase.
the lifetime cost of raising one child at roughly $414,000, and that calculation stops at age seventeen
Analysts now place the lifetime cost of raising one child at roughly $414,000, and that calculation stops at age seventeen. Even the older federal benchmark, framed in 2015 dollars, required a middle-income family to spend about $17,000 per year on each child. Single women working full-time earn a median of about $40,000; more than one in four live below the poverty line. Insisting that they absorb a six-figure liability while continuing to pay rent, loans, and insurance is not “family values.” It is economic sabotage.
Education is the escalator that pushes women toward higher earnings, yet an unplanned birth can break that machinery. Sixty-one percent of community-college students who have a child while enrolled never finish their degree, a dropout rate nearly two-thirds higher than that of classmates without children. A pregnancy late in senior year can delay graduation, defer professional licensing exams, and erase two years of salary growth. Over a typical career, that stall can reduce lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars—compound interest that will never be recouped. Teen births have fallen by almost seventy percent since the millennium, a public-health triumph powered by contraception and, yes, access to abortion. But more than 140,000 teenagers still gave birth in 2022, and rapid repeat pregnancies cut the odds of finishing high school by 80 percent. If we want these young women to become self-sufficient adults instead of permanent clients of the social-safety net, preventing unwanted births—not merely re-homing infants—must remain the priority.
Childbirth eclipses the physical toll of almost any other elective medical event: organ displacement, pelvic-floor trauma, cesarean incisions that rival battlefield surgery. Even uncomplicated deliveries can leave lingering incontinence, chronic pain, or cardiovascular strain. Mental recovery is slower still; postpartum depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress are more common among women who did not intend to be pregnant. Mandating gestation for those already traumatized by rape or coercion is state-sanctioned re-victimization, not pro-life compassion.
If adoption were the seamless remedy that politicians describe, America’s foster-care rolls would be shrinking. They are not. About 370,000 children remain in the system, where the average stay approaches two years. Only seven percent are infants—the demographic often described as “most wanted” by adoptive parents. For the vast majority, permanency remains elusive. Adding tens of thousands more babies to that queue will not shorten it; it will snap it.
Denying reproductive autonomy to single women in 2025 is not protecting life; it is protecting a hierarchy that assigns all the risk to those already earning less, saving less, and judged more.
Anti-abortion rhetoric frames pregnancy as a woman’s individual responsibility, ignoring that conception, by definition, requires two parties. Men can—and routinely do—walk away from living, breathing children, leaving mothers and taxpayers to pick up the check. No court forces a man to donate bone marrow to save a life he helped create; yet women are compelled to donate their bodies for ten months under threat of criminal penalty. The inconsistency reveals what the debate is really about: policing female independence.
Reliable birth control and safe, legal abortion function like shock absorbers in a modern economy. They allow women to time childbearing around degree completion, home purchases, and union wages. When the pill became widely available, the number of women earning professional degrees surged, and the gender wage gap narrowed. Remove that infrastructure and we do not revert to Norman Rockwell; we slide toward Dickens—crowded orphanages, shuttered career doors, and deepening poverty among single-mother households already facing a poverty rate above twenty percent.
Men already possess the cultural permission to walk away from parenthood; equity demands that women hold the same off-ramp.
Since Dobbs, single women in abortion-hostile states shoulder interstate-travel costs, unpaid leave, and childcare for the children they already have (nearly sixty percent of abortion patients are mothers). Federal action could level the field. Congress could restore full Title X funding, protect interstate tele-medicine abortion, and expand the Child Tax Credit so parenthood is a genuine choice, not a poverty trap. A woman who declines to host a pregnancy is not discarding a chubby-cheeked cherub. She is averting the thirty-four-hour labor that can rupture organs, the four-month sleep deficit that can trigger psychosis, and the $17,000-a-year budget line that may foreclose her ambitions—and those of any future children she does choose to have. Men already possess the cultural permission to walk away from parenthood; equity demands that women hold the same off-ramp.
Freedom is not theoretical. It lives in calendars uncluttered by mandatory prenatal visits, in bank statements spared formula receipts, in résumés uninterrupted by maternity-leave gaps. Denying reproductive autonomy to single women in 2025 is not protecting life; it is protecting a hierarchy that assigns all the risk to those already earning less, saving less, and judged more. Until every woman holds the right to decide if, when, and under what circumstances she will carry a pregnancy, the American promise of equal opportunity remains a fiction—one that costs $414,000 and counting.