The costs of restricting abortion? More than $130 billion per year.

When the US Supreme Court decided to overrule Roe v. Wade three years ago, the ruling had sweeping consequences for public health, making pregnancy much riskier, leading to the preventable deaths of pregnant women, and causing a spike in infant mortality. Now, research suggests the country has also suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, with the ripple effects being felt in abortion-friendly and -hostile states alike.

A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.

Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.

This is not the first indication that Dobbs has shrunken the workforce and stunted the economy. Recent research from both IWPR and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for example, shows that young, highly educated people are moving out of states with abortion bans. And another recent NBER paper found that abortion restrictions increased rates of intimate partner violence by 7 to 10 percent, contributing to a projected increase of $1.24 billion in social costs, including health care and lost productivity for victims. But the new IWPR fact sheet provides some of the timeliest analysis of the economic impacts of Dobbs, and helps quantify the overall costs of rising abortion restrictions nationwide. “This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude,” says Melissa Mahoney, senior research economist at IWPR and lead author of the report. 

A new Harris poll published last week found that women on both sides of the political aisle already report being more worried about the state of the economy than men do. Even before President Donald Trump’s return to office, which has brought tariffs and fears of a recession, the skyrocketing cost of childcare and the lack of federal paid leave already made life difficult for working parents in the US. The latest data shows how abortion bans can exacerbate the problem, by driving women into lower-paying jobs or out of paid work entirely, Mahoney explains. 

Yana Rodgers, a professor of economics at labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, who was not involved with the IWPR report but reviewed a copy of it provided by Mother Jones, said the findings are not surprising given ample research showing how abortion legalization impacts women’s economic standing. If anything, she added, the costs of Dobbs are likely even bigger than the estimates in the report, given other expected ripple effects, such as increases in child poverty and more families relying on public assistance.

Unsurprisingly, the report found that it is conservative states with the most restrictive abortion policies whose labor forces and economies have been most negatively impacted. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, which have total abortion bans with extremely limited exceptions, would see the largest labor force participation increases among women of reproductive age if their current restrictions were reversed; those states have also sustained an average of $1.8 billion in annual economic losses, IWPR estimates. More than a dozen states, including Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia, would see their gross domestic product, or GDPs—the total value of goods and services produced within one year—increase by 0.8 percent or more without their current restrictions. These red states already “tend to have worse supports and protections for families,” Mahoney says, adding that abortion restrictions will likely make the situation worse in the long run. Without abortion restrictions, the national GDP would also rise by 0.5 percent due to women’s increased labor force participation, the IWPR report says. Rodgers, from Rutgers, says that’s “substantial,” given that national GDP growth has hovered around 2.5 percent in recent years.

The Trump administration has also been undermining women’s workforce participation in other ways—for example, by moving to dismantle the 105-year-old Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, which has historically fought for working women. The administration also canceled congressionally-mandated grants administered by that office to get more women into trades, and is reportedly considering a slate of policies to encourage more mothers to opt out of paid work and stay at home to raise young children. The Trump-backed reconciliation bill Republicans are trying to push through Congress is also likely to harm women and families, through proposed cuts to Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, and food stamps, according to a brief from the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.

In the absence of government support, business owners can implement policies to try to recruit and retain pregnant and parenting workers, Mahoney says. Among them: Offer paid family and sick leave, expand health care coverage and travel assistance to employees who need to access abortions out of state, and allow remote work to make it easier for people to manage families or avoid moving to states with abortion bans. Data suggests such policies are popular: A recent survey of 10,000 adults conducted by IWPR, Morning Consult, and the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority of employed adults believe companies should speak out in favor of reproductive rights, and nearly half say they would be more likely to apply for or accept a job if an employer provided reproductive health care benefits. Rodgers has also written about how facilitating employees’ access to abortion and fertility care, such as in vitro fertilization, saves money for employers, in part by reducing turnover due to parents leaving the workforce. 

Unlike papers published in academic journals, the IWPR analysis is not peer-reviewed, a process that involves independent researchers’ extensive analysis of a paper’s methodology and findings. The authors of the IWPR paper relied upon assessments from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights, of the severity of state-level abortion policies as of last December. From there, IWPR researchers analyzed women’s labor force participation in those states and then estimated how labor force participation among women of reproductive age might differ without the abortion restrictions in place, using a methodology they previously developed. Then, they calculated the estimated impacts of women’s labor force losses on their earnings to estimate overall state and national economic losses due to abortion restrictions.

For anti-abortion Republicans who claim to be fiscally conservative, the new figures from IWPR may come as a shock. (Mother Jones shared a summary of the IWPR findings with spokespeople for the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has urged Kennedy to restrict access to abortion pills. None responded to our requests for comment.)

For Mahoney, that’s IWPR’s goal: to help GOP lawmakers see abortion restrictions as the economic catastrophe that they are. “Conceptualizing things in terms of dollars,” she says, “may have some meaning to them.”