As a group of conservative states enacted strict abortion restrictions last year, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker sent letters to a handful of corporate executives with close ties to Texas.
Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, urged executives to reconsider basing their companies in “a country that robs its citizens of their dignity.” Most workers, he writes, do not want to live under a strict abortion ban.
There was no immediate response to his overture. Companies that thrived in Texas’ free-business environment weren’t about to flee because of legally challenged abortion provisions that weren’t certain to be enforced.
Ten months later, the political and legal landscape is radically different. And a Supreme Court ruling that struck down abortion rights now threatens to shift the lines of economic competition between conservative and liberal states.
For companies based in economically vibrant conservative states like Texas, Tennessee and Georgia, rolling back women’s rights is no longer a hypothetical scenario, but an immediate challenge. That represents a potential upset in the calculus that has made Republican-led Sun Belt states attractive to big companies, which have been willing to accept reduced taxes and regulations while treating local social policy as something of a sideshow.
That deal may have become more difficult in states that have imposed criminal restrictions on abortion, banning the procedure entirely or restricting it almost to the point of elimination.
Some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including JPMorgan Chase, AT&T and the Walt Disney Company, have already announced they will take steps to help employees who need access to abortion but can’t get it in their home countries. states. There have been no major announcements yet of companies canceling expansions or moving offices out of jurisdictions where abortion is now banned.
In states like Texas and Georgia, Republican lawmakers are effectively betting that the local business environment will remain attractive enough to overcome concerns about women’s rights. And for some conservative politicians, the risk of expropriating business investment is a price worth paying to eradicate abortion.
The outcome of the Supreme Court’s ruling could be more dangerous for states that share Texas’ economic and social policies but lack its longstanding status as an economic powerhouse — states like Arkansas and Oklahoma, which have passed some of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. the country.
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In places where abortion laws are now hotly contested, some business leaders are urging politicians to tread carefully.
“An extreme response is not in the competitive interest of the state,” said Sandy Barua, president of the Detroit Regional Chamber, an influential business association in Michigan. “As much as the data today shows that young professionals care about this issue, I don’t want to give young professionals a reason not to come to Michigan to work for Michigan companies.”
Mr. Barua’s group responded to the Supreme Court ruling with a statement imploring state officials not to do anything that could make Michigan less welcoming to business recruiting. The state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Republican-controlled Legislature are currently clashing over the fate of a nearly century-old abortion ban that was struck down by Roe v. Wade but never formally repealed.
Mr. Barua acknowledged that some states, such as Texas, may be so well established as business havens that they can ignore concerns about abortion rights and talent recruitment. Of his own state, Mr. Barua said, “Michigan needs every advantage it can get.”
In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, issued a similar warning Wednesday when he issued an executive order strengthening abortion rights in the state. Mr. Cooper, who has vowed to veto any abortion ban passed by the Republican Legislature, said any such measure “would have a negative effect on economic growth here in our state.”
Some Republican-controlled states that already have abortion restrictions, such as Florida and South Carolina, are considering whether to tighten them even further. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, perhaps the most prominent conservative governor, has enacted a 15-week ban, but some state lawmakers are pushing for a so-called heartbeat bill that would block all but the earliest abortions.
Gina Raimondo, the nation’s commerce secretary, said in an interview that states that impose strict abortion bans will certainly suffer economically.
“I’ve talked to CEOs who are rethinking these states,” said Ms. Raimondo, a Democrat. “I think the cumulative effect over time will become quite significant.”
Big companies are waging a “war for talent,” Ms. Raimondo said, and especially for female talent, given that women make up a growing majority of new college graduates. A former governor of Rhode Island, Ms. Raimondo predicted that companies would find it difficult to hire skilled workers in states where women’s rights and health care are sharply limited.
There’s data to support that view: A survey released this month by the Pew Research Center found that more than 3 in 5 people with college or graduate degrees disapprove of the Supreme Court decision, along with nearly 70 percent of people under 30 . -two percent of women disapprove of the decision, according to the survey.
A young and educated group of workers has pushed companies in recent years to be more vocal in speaking out on issues of broad social concern, including gay rights and racial justice, putting some large corporations at odds with the conservative states they call home. .
Some liberal states are already portraying their abortion rights policies as a business advantage, boosting the appeal of the wealthier and more progressive states that many businesses choose to call home despite their taxes.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, suggested companies should consider his state’s ironclad protections of abortion rights as an incentive to expand there. Mr. Pritzker, a billionaire venture capitalist before entering politics, said in a recent interview that his administration was including information about Illinois’ abortion laws in its recruiting pitches to companies, especially after the court’s draft opinion expired. in a Politico article in early May.
As a policy matter, Mr. Pritzker urged Democrats to lean on the message that abortion restrictions are bad for the economy.
“A Democratic president and vice president, Democrats more broadly, need to talk about this first as an individual rights and freedom issue and second as an economic issue,” he said. “Workers care about it.”
This is not the first time in recent years that right-wing social policies have thrown business competition at the state level into turmoil. In 2016, Republican lawmakers in North Carolina sparked a years-long business boycott by passing a law — known as the “bathroom bill” — requiring transgender people to use facilities that match the gender they were assigned at birth. Two years earlier, Arizona’s business community mobilized against so-called religious freedom legislation that could open the door to discrimination against LGBTQ people.
In Virginia, a 2012 attempt by far-right lawmakers to require women to get an invasive ultrasound before having an abortion sparked outrage among moderate voters and corporate leaders, helping a pro-business Democrat become governor the following year. In 2011, Mississippi’s business community rallied to reject a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have granted legal rights to a fertilized egg, defying the then-current Roe v. Wade decision.
Yet even amid this drumbeat of controversy, a handful of large, conservative-leaning states like Texas, Florida and Georgia have defied predictions that anti-gay policies or laissez faire gun laws would deter new investment. Indeed, Republican governors have recently become more inclined to oppose big business: When Disney recently expressed disapproval of a Florida law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, Mr. DeSantis responded with a blistering attack.
Scott Reid, a Republican strategist who has served as a top official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, doubts whether abortion laws would do much to undermine the economic appeal of conservative states.
“These red states with low taxes, low regulation, investment in education and roads — that’s the real contrast to these older blue states that are kind of falling apart,” Mr. Reid said.
There is no recent precedent, however, for a swing to the right in state politics on the scale of the crackdown on abortion now underway in much of the United States. The full impact of the new restrictions is still uncertain in many countries, and some bans are fraught with questions about how they will be implemented. Some, like Oklahoma’s total abortion ban, seem so far-reaching that they could threaten other types of reproductive care, including some infertility treatments.
In Texas, the largest and most prosperous state where abortion is now illegal, business leaders…
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