What Karl Marx Can Teach Us about Abortion

“What better way to avoid paying for maternity leave, family health insurance, and other perks than to make sure that one’s employees never have children?”

Editor’s note: This piece expands on an op-ed originally published by the author at Intellectual Takeout on October 17th.

Since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June of last year, major corporations have closed ranks around the now-beleaguered right to abortion. To make sense of their enthusiasm, one must turn to one Karl Marx. The German revolutionary wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 that the “bourgeoisie,” the economic elite in industrialized societies, “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

Such charges would have made little sense at the time of writing. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Victorian-era upper classes were preoccupied with domesticity. Historian Christopher Lasch wrote in 1990 that:

“[n]ineteenth-century  philanthropists, humanitarians, and social reformers argued with  one voice that the revolution of rising expectations meant a higher standard of domestic  life, not an orgy of self-indulgence activated by fantasies of inordinate personal wealth…The obligation to support a wife and children, in their view, would discipline possessive  individualism and transform the potential gambler, speculator, dandy, or confidence man  into a conscientious provider.”

The urge to preserve traditional mores led to temperance campaigns and the promotion of “republican motherhood.” It also meant that sparing women the hardship of industrial modernity often took precedence over an otherwise laissez-faire approach to economic productivity and freedom of commerce. In the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court affirmed Oregon’s law capping the maximum number of hours women could contract to work for on the grounds that preserving maternal health was a legitimate exercise of the state’s police powers, thus carving out an exception to the then-prevailing “economic substantive due process” doctrine whereby the state was otherwise barred from limiting an individual’s contractual rights.