When applying to residencies, there’s a thing called the “couples match,” where you and your spouse/paramour/best buddy can set it up so as to guarantee that you’ll end up in the same city, at the risk of getting into a slightly less prestigious program in their chosen specialties. As it turned out, about half of the couples in my senior year of medical school broke up rather than enter into this match, an especially mind-boggling fact because the gain from breaking up was so small. After all, people graduating from a residency at no-name hospitals can get private practice jobs like anyone else. Going to a prestigious program only makes a difference to the small minority of people looking to practice in academic institutions.
Sidestepping the moral question on abortion for the moment, I think it’s a reasonable inference that the sexual marketplace among young professionals, too, would collapse without easy abortion available as a backstop. Careerism is too brittle and risk averse, and birth control in practice is too fallible, for the kind of risk aversion that young professionals maintain. To embrace the risk of having a kid and getting your zero-slack professional life derailed is a radically countercultural move - as countercultural as eating vegan, observing the Sabbath, or, apparently, keeping your girlfriend when a slightly more prestigious residency is on the line.
If there was no recourse for accidentally “catching parenthood,” the white collar mating marketplace would be fundamentally upended. In the best case, replaced by something else, in the worst case, replaced by nothing. This is probably not irrelevant to the current stalemate on the Abortion Question.
1) I would generally interpret people breaking up in senior year of medical school not to mean that they value the small gain in career prestige over their relationship, but that “doing the match together” is a signal of commitment that one or both parties were not willing to make. Maybe I’m wrong.
2) If you have a contraceptive implant, your probability of pregnancy is 5 basis points per year. (According to the CDC, I haven’t dug into the literature or anything.) That’s like, pretty unlikely. (That makes an implant more effective than abstinence alone given that rape is a thing, according to the extremely back-of-the-envelope calculation I just did.) If I were listing the top 100 most likely things that might derail my career, I doubt that would make the list. I literally had a discussion with my coworkers about the probability of an earthquake destroying our office two days ago–I spend a lot of time thinking about tail risks–and even I don’t think that’s worth worrying about. (And not to get into sex ed, but if 5 bps does worry you there are lots of great methods you can combine with hormonal birth control.)
Obviously, most women don’t use the maximally effective contraception. But if we’re positing that these ambitious professional women are low-time-preference enough to be driven to celibacy for the sake of their careers, you’d think they’d at least consider some other options first.