The Financial Advantages of Abortion: Myth or Reality?
Financial concerns are the most common reason women say they get an abortion. As any parent will tell you, children are expensive, and if the pregnancy is not planned, abortion appears to be a low-cost way for a woman to preserve her current lifestyle and secure her future opportunities. Numerous scholarly articles reach this conclusion as well. (If you are interested in critiques of that position, check the Charlotte Lozier Institute for some forthcoming articles.) However, there are some basic questions that challenge this prevailing “wisdom.”
Do Children Make People Poor?
If children make adults poorer, household net worth data should reflect that. Below is a table comparing various measures of household net worth for households with and without children.
Selected Household Net Worth
| Household (HH) Composition | Net Worth (NW) | % of HH with NW >$500K | % of HH Own Stocks | % of HH Own Real Estate |
| No children under 18 | $155,200 | 27.7% | 25.3% | 15.5% |
| 1 or more children <18 | 103,500 | 22.0% | 24.8% | 13.9% |
| Youngest child <5 | 68,610 | 16.2% | 24.9% | 9.2% |
| Youngest child 5 to 9 | 102,400 | 20.2% | 23.8% | 14.8% |
| Youngest child 10 to 18 | 166,600 | 29.2% | 25.3% | 17.9% |
Source: U.S. Census, Wealth, Asset Ownership, & Debt of Households Detailed Tables: 2020
Numerous caveats about proper statistical analysis apply, and these are only a few numbers from many that are available. But even this table reveals an important insight: Households with children the longest are the wealthiest, in every category. The data counter the prevailing narrative.
Do Children Make Single Women Poor?
Maybe, generally speaking, children do not correlate with poverty. But do they with the most financially fragile households — those headed by young single women?
Evidence [1] shows that single mothers have a disproportionately high poverty rate. A 2024 report from the Center for American Progress stated, “Single mothers are more likely to live in poverty: In 2022, single mothers had a poverty rate of 28 percent.” The data, as presented below, confirm that statement.
Female Poverty Statistics by Household Type (2022)
| Female head of house | .. Female householder, …no spouse present | . HH with children under age 18 | .HH with children under age 6 | |
| HH below poverty line | 3,462 | 11,720 | 6,144 | 2,043 |
| Total HH | 15,040 | 47,420 | 16,500 | 4,554 |
| Poverty Rate | 23.0% | 24.7% | 37.3% | 44.8% |
Note: All numbers in thousands
Source: U.S. Census, Poverty in the United States: 2022, Table A-2
Almost half of the households headed by single women with young children are in poverty. But, in referring to the first table, we see that younger people have lower net worth in general. So, how much of this difference is due to age is hard to know, but it is definitely a factor, as the table shows households with older children and presumably older parents, have less poverty. But this is only one side of a many sided topic, and we can look at it from other, often ignored, angles.
The first angle is behavior: What are women actually doing? According to the CDC, the U.S. will have 1.46 million out-of-wedlock births this year. That’s approximately half of all births for 2024. If women believe children cause poverty, they would make different choices — unless one assumes that every one of these births was a desired abortion that did not happen. If so, that would be the most abortions ever in a single year. Women are choosing single motherhood and, if the narrative is accurate, choosing poverty.
The second angle is the two variables in the phrase “single mother.” Most of the emphasis is on “mother,” but how much does “single” contribute to these statistics? As the table below shows, single women have the highest poverty rate of any demographic.
Poverty Rates in the United States by Marital Status
| Marital status | Both Sexes | Men | Women |
| All | 10.0 | 7.4 | 12.1 |
| Married | 5.0 | 5.1 | 4.9 |
| Widowed | 14.8 | 9.2 | 16.3 |
| Divorced | 16.2 | 12.8 | 18.4 |
| Never married | 23.6 | 20.4 | 26.1 |
(U.S. Social Security Administration, 2016)
It’s clear married women have the lowest poverty rate. Referencing the first table, the difference in the poverty rate between single women with young children and all female-headed households (no spouse present) is 20.1%. The poverty-rate gap between single women and married women is 21.2%. The argument is not that these two statistics are comparable. That would be bad methodology, but there is a case to argue that being single contributes as much to poverty as children do.
Despite decades of rhetoric denigrating marriage as a bad deal for women, the reality is that single motherhood is a really bad (financial) deal for women — being single may be the worse part. The reality is that women have been sold a false promise, that being single is empowering. The data do not support this.
Some middle- and upper-class daughters do go on to have successful careers and independent financial security. But they are the exceptions. The reality is single women are poorer than single men and poorer than married women. This is a condition abortion does not address. Children may not help single women get out of poverty, but they are not the cause of it.
[1]The author used “Numerous caveats” about and “Numerous reports” here and also has “report” in the next sentence.
