If you’ve been on the internet at all today, you know that Sunday, Jan. 21 marked what would have been the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling that declared a Constitutional right to abortion. The recent death of Roe, some seven months ago, was hailed as a monumental victory among so-called “pro-lifers” who say the majority decision, written by Justice Alito and joined by fellow conservatives, means millions of innocent babies would be saved.

Of course, that begs the question: Will this lead to a massive influx of newborns, and, if yes, who will care for them?

This conundrum raises obvious questions about economics. Nearly half of all abortion seekers in the United States live below the federal poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that researches reproductive health care, and three-quarters of abortion seekers are low-income folks. Additionally, nearly 60 percent of abortion seekers already have children. An influx of post-Roe babies, brought into the world under forced-birth circumstances, will largely affect low-income families that are already supporting children.

A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute further affirms the economic burdens that come with abortion bans and restrictions. It found that states that restrict abortion care—roughly half in the country—set the minimum wage lower than their counterparts, are less likely to have expanded Medicaid, and have higher incarceration rates. Abortion-hostile states also have fewer recipients of unemployment benefits, though the unemployment rates are proportionate to states that affirm abortion rights. In the study, 24 states plus Washington, D.C. are categorized as places where abortion is protected. Twenty-six states either heavily restrict abortion or ban the procedure altogether. “While the effect of abortion denial is overwhelmingly negative economically, mentally, and physically, there is also strong evidence for the flip side of this argument: that access to abortion is associated with positive economic outcomes, including lower rates of teen births and teen marriages,” writes Asha Banerjee, the author of the report.

Oriaku Njoku, president of the National Network of Abortion Funds, has seen first-hand the economic challenges that many abortion seekers are up against. In a press call last week, they (Njoku uses she/they pronouns) rattled off a list of common circumstances for people who seek help from abortion funds. Often, folks are unemployed or have limited employment. Perhaps they’re uninsured, or they rely on a form of federal insurance which, due to the Hyde Amendment, cannot cover abortion care. “The majority of people who call abortion funds are parents and young people in their 20s working to make ends meet,” they said. “Every single barrier to abortion is based in racism, economic oppression, and gender injustice.”

Long-term research backs up Njoku’s assertions. The Turnaway Study, a first-of-its-kind research effort from the University of California-San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program, followed people who sought abortions for a decade to assess the consequences of being “turned away” from care. The negative economic impacts were a significant part of those consequences, and the resulting hardship and insecurity lingered for years. Women who were denied abortion care and went on to give birth “experienced an increase in household poverty lasting at least four years relative to those who received an abortion,” in addition to a greater likelihood of dealing with food and housing insecurity and a lower credit score.

In short: the most vulnerable people in the U.S. will shoulder most of the consequences from forced birth, economic and emotional. In the Atlantic, Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College, estimated there could be some 50,000 additional births in the U.S. in the next year. “When you consider that there were more than 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2021, an increase of 50,000 births, or 1.4 percent, may not seem that significant,” journalist Melissa Jeltsen writes. “But these births won’t be equally distributed among the population; they’re likely to be concentrated among the poorest of the poor, in states where the social safety net is frayed to begin with.”

Abortion rights advocates concur.

“Our country is not prepared or equipped for a big wave of forced births,” says Alyx Carrasquel, a network-building coordinator at Florida Access Network, an abortion fund. “[The current situation] just increases an existing crisis.”

Carrasquel, too, would know. The Florida Access Network has seen a 235 percent increase in demand for its services from 2021 to 2022. “A lot of people that we help are already parents, and it’s evident that they’re already struggling to keep up,” she tells Reckon, especially as US inflation rates have soared over the last year. (According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2021, the median cost for abortion services was $500.) On top of that, the Florida fund is experiencing greater demand at greater cost, given the gestational time constraints of the state’s 15-week ban and the further travel distances that patients are enduring.

Of course, if it is about saving babies, as abortion opponents say, then it’s crucial to consider maternal and infant health care as well. A report from the March of Dimes last year showed that more than 2.2 million women of reproductive age live in maternity care deserts “that have no hospital offering obstetric care, no birth center and no obstetric provider.”

And, according to a new report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute, women in states with abortion bans are three times more likely to die in childbirth. Six in 10 women live in states that either outright ban or “sharply limit” reproductive freedom, and that’s also true of seven in 10 Black women, who, as has been well-documented, experience a three-times higher likelihood of maternal mortality than white women. According to a report by the National Partnership for Women and Families, nearly 6.5 million Latinas, or 42 percent of all Latinas of reproductive age in the country, live in a state that either has or is likely to ban abortion.

Infant health outcomes in those areas are also sobering. The Gender Equity Policy Institute report also says that babies born in states with abortion bans are 30 percent more likely to die in their first month of life. And Black babies are more than two times more likely to die in their first month than white babies.

In the months since the Dobbs ruling, there has been myriad claims from anti-abortion centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers, that they are ready to step up and help pregnant people who are unable to terminate their pregnancies.

Ashley Underwood, the director of Equity Forward, a watchdog organization that monitors anti-abortion centers, explained that the approach of such organizations is paternalistic and rooted in racist and classist ideals that are harmful to those they purport to serve. “They’re tinged with white supremacist ideals,” she said. Anti-abortion centers often employ “earn as you learn” programs, in which expecting parents earn currency by attending parenting classes that can be used in the center’s store to buy necessities like diapers, strollers, and formula. These centers, too, receive funding through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), which means that they act as a middleman when those funds could, in theory, go directly to families who need the support.

“Anti-abortion centers are not necessary, they’re not effective, and it’s time to explore other ways that public dollars can be used to support parents and pregnant people,” Underwood says.

These centers, Underwood says, are often constructed and target communities of color. As sociologist Dorothy Roberts has thoroughly documented in her work, the same is true of Child Protective Services agencies, which, Roberts’ research shows, has a deep and disturbing pattern of taking children away from their parents in Black communities for minor or imagined infractions and doing little to reunite them. Further, more and more investigations into state Children’s Services departments find that resources are stretched and staff are overwhelmed, resulting in horrific child abuse.

It is also worth noting that the very people who are passing anti-abortion legislation in the name of a “pro-life” moral imperative are also the ones who have chipped away at programs that provide funding to alleviate poverty and create healthier communities. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, the very states that are deeply anti-abortion are much more likely to be the same ones that refused to expand Medicaid. That’s no coincidence.