Anti-Choice Groups: Give Birth Or We'll Kill This Costco

A coalition of anti-abortion groups is trying to pressure stores from selling mifepristone, by arguing that the stores are aborting future customers.

<HALT, WOMAN: HAVE YOU BIRTHED ENOUGH FUTURE CUSTOMERS TO FULFILL YOUR FIDUCIARY DUTIES THE COSTCO WHOLESALE CORPORATION? PLEASE RETURN ALL KIRKLAND PRODUCTS TO THE SHELVES UNTIL YOU HAVE MET YOUR BIRTH QUOTA>

Conservatives often trivialize care work, dismissing it as women’s duty. But sometimes they slip up and admit, albeit in creepy terms, the essential role mothers play in the economy. In a new letter to brands like Costco and Walmart, an anti-choice coalition tried pricing out parents’ contribution to companies’ bottom line. The letter, spotted by journalist Susan Rinkunas, urged these stores to stop selling the abortion drug mifepristone in their pharmacy departments because aborted fetuses represent a lost customer base.

“Shrinking your customer base is also bad for business,” reads the letter, organized by the arch-conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. 

“The Brookings Institution recently estimated that the average American family will spend $310,000 to raise a child born in 2015. This includes over $50,000 in food and $15,000 on clothes, not to mention furniture, other household and healthcare items, toys and games, or diapers and formula, all things your stores sell. Dispensing the abortion drug will reduce demand for all of these and only make worse the crisis of record low birth rates.”

One of the letter’s signatories made the math more explicit in an interview with an anti-choice publication, noting that Costco could make $200 selling mifepristone to one customer, or it could make $12,000 over 10 years if the customer was made to give birth and provide for a child.

"How in the world can it be for the benefit of the company to kill future customers?" the signatory said. "There's no way that it can be."

This is a revealing sentiment, one that suggests forced birth as an untapped market for companies.

So, okay: assume Costco caves, stops offering mifepristone, helps coerce a person into birth, and makes $12,000 over the first ten years of the child’s life? How do that mother and child fare, financially?

Thanks to reproductive health research, we know that women who are denied abortions and forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term are four times more likely to end up living below the federal poverty line within ten years. That hardship is the result of the significant costs involved in child rearing (the anti-choice group highlighted these as an economic upside for corporations), as well as the employment challenges facing mothers (especially single mothers and those who cannot afford childcare).

Many working mothers, especially those without reliable childcare, are pigeonholed into part-time work or jobs with irregular scheduling. These gigs often pay little and frequently assign workers too few hours, making it difficult for those workers to qualify for benefits like healthcare. This is a profitable dynamic for companies, which rely on a pool of precarious workers whom they can pay little.

Forced birth isn’t economically beneficial for anyone except companies and the occasional man.

It’s ironic, then, to see a different fringe of anti-choice conservatives argue against abortion from a supposedly pro-worker perspective.

In remarks reported by the Christian Science Monitor this week, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed that some companies only support abortion rights because they don’t want workers to have children. In a 2021 speech to a conservative think tank, Vance claimed that “corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

One could argue that those companies support abortion rights because most Americans do, and because abortion is an integral part of health care, which companies are tasked with providing in the absence of a strong national health service.

But Vance’s argument doesn’t reflect reality—or a majority conservative consensus. The anti-choice letter to Costco makes clear that the right sees coerced birth not as a drag on employees but as the source of future consumers.