From a Google Image Search - Teachers College, Columbia University
Ever since the end of World War II, the women who pitched in and did the work of the nation, who became factory workers, service workers, and public servants, have stayed in the workforce. Through the boom years of the fifties Americans built wealth from the benefits that having two incomes afforded to many families. When the factories left for countries with cheaper labor many women became the sole earners in the family until men transitioned to their new reality and found new jobs or started businesses. When jobs that had seemed as if they would last until retirement suddenly disappeared some men experienced a trauma that left them reeling with mental depression, unable to accept that they would earn lower wages than they had been used to.
Women also had to adjust to new realities. Many women had to find ways to raise children, run households, and work. They turned to grandparents who could care for the children when work hours did not permit mothers to be with their children. They turned to neighbors, they dressed their children and drove them to childcare centers if they could afford to do so or if there were childcare centers available.
Women in poor neighborhoods who had received welfare payments (which have been given various names under different administrations) often stayed home with their young children until someone changed these programs to require moms to either go to school or go to work to collect "welfare" payments. These moms had to find family members to care for their toddlers or young children unless they qualified for Head Start. Things improved when preschool was added to public schooling, but this usually started at 3 or 4 years old. Babies don't arrive to parents as 3 and 4-year-olds of course.
Until birth control pills came along women relied on diaphragms, the "rhythm method" (look it up, it doesn't work), or on their partners to wear condoms which men tend to dislike. Birth control pills changed life for families, for both women and men, for the community, and for female and infant mortality rates. Birth control pills allowed women or women and men to plan for new babies, space them out, and give each child the attention necessary to make a good start in life. Not every family used the advantages of family planning. Sometimes a life was too chaotic or held too many challenges, but gradually families became smaller, and resources became available within the family to ensure that children could be provided with the things they needed to thrive. College educations became within reach of many families.
Melinda Gates published her book The Moment of Lift in April of 2019. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation traveled to less developed nations offering free vaccinations to help prevent life-threatening diseases like polio. But Melinda soon found that what women in these nations really craved were birth control pills. She visited mostly rural areas with agrarian economies. Women were expected to stay pregnant because infant mortality rates were high and farm families hoped to raise multiple children to help with the work of the farm. Mortality rates were also high for mothers though. And when a woman was pregnant, she was not as much help with the farming. Husbands tended to have very traditional views and did not like the idea of women having control over when and how many children would be born. Once women used birth control pills and husbands experienced the benefits to the family's fortunes birth control pills became more popular than vaccinations, although the foundation continued to offer both. Parents thrived, children thrived, mortality rates fell, and family farms became stable and profitable enterprises.
"As soon as we began to spend more time understanding how people live their lives, we saw that so many barriers to advancement and so many of the causes of isolation--can be traced to the limits put on the lives of women." (The Moment of Lift, p. 50)
"When I talk to women in low-income countries, I see very little difference in what we women all want for ourselves and our children. We want our kids to be safe, to be healthy, to be happy, to do well in school, to fulfill their potential, to grow up and have families and livelihoods of their own--to love and be loved."(p. 57)
"When women can time and space their births, maternal mortality drops, newborn and child mortality drops, the mother and baby are healthier, the parents have more time and energy to care for each child, and families can put more resources toward the nutrition and education of each one. There was no intervention more powerful--and no intervention that had become more neglected." (p. 59)
Everything that is said about contraception is equally true about abortion. Mistakes happen. Pregnancies occur from sexual abuse, a passionate moment or birth control that is not working properly, from missed pills or other medical issues. Many men work with women on family planning but there are also many men who may work against women's attempts to control her pregnancies. Women may get pregnant on purpose to entrap a man only to find that he feels only anger and walks away from the relationship. Many unplanned pregnancies cannot be blamed on women. We do know that an unwanted pregnancy can make a woman desperate, and the woman will do anything to rid herself of the pregnancy. Abortion is a humane solution to the reproductive pressures women (and men) face. Aborting an unformed child is far better than bringing children into this world who will be treated with haphazard attention or suffer from inadequate family finances.
We are a culture that can see and study the challenges women face but cannot agree to do the simplest things like make sure childcare centers are available for all working women, make sure that all families have enough resources to care for the children they bear or that children without parents will be raised with love. If this bothers your Christian sensibilities and you feel that any cluster of cells that forms in a woman's womb is a life, then perhaps it is time to grow our babies in tanks and outlaw sexual intercourse.
There is plenty of evidence that suggests that when women have reproductive freedom, benefits do not just accrue to women but to everyone. Children do better when women can space out births, husbands get more quality time with wives and wives can have careers that boost the family's finances and help the family prosper. Wives can use their brains to give them balanced lives that keep them engaged and happy. You know the famous saying, "Happy Wife, Happy Life". Single women can also survive and be successful.
We don't live in a primitive society where the physical strengths of men and women dictate our roles in daily life. Why would we work so hard to make advanced economies desirable and then retreat to male and female roles that pertained in environments that were wilder and full of danger, when food had to be gathered by hand and abundance of food that could be hunted or gathered determined where people could live. Why must men use religious arguments to "put women in their place" and force women to give birth in a submissive role that could place many women in danger of abuse? Why should America retreat from our forefathers' intentions to keep religion separate from government? Imposing Christian values on every American is against the ideals of our founders and our citizens.
Imposing old male-female roles will not make America great again. The evidence is easy to access as there are still societies that choose to live according to traditional, nonindustrial rules. These are the places visited by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the evidence is presented in Melinda's book, The Moment of Lift. Choosing to be a nonindustrial state limits families' access to modern medicines and procedures that improve the quality of life particularly for women and children, but these limits spill over into the lives of men and place limits on prosperity. Even in an industrialized society, high rates of infant mortality can prevail for people from impoverished neighborhoods or rural areas where pre- and post-natal care may depend on access to hospitals.
Stop taking our culture backward. Keep reproductive freedom for women intact. America has covered this ground already and we enshrined women's rights for good reasons.
"[M]en's and women's interests should be aligned, and the men who see this are the ones we want leading family planning discussions with other men." (The Moment of Lift, p. 80)