The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has ended a half century where the right to abortion was, at least to some degree, recognized in federal law. Now states governed by (often gerrymandered) Republican majorities can pass laws prohibiting abortion or enforcing restrictive measures already on the books. Though access to safe and legal abortions has been chipped away in states like Mississippi for decades, the court’s ruling will kick off a new period of persecution for people who are pregnant and the doctors who attempt to care for them.

The massive rollback has sparked considerable discussion among leftists over what is behind this titanic escalation of the war on abortion rights. One theory has sought to link abortion restrictions to the needs of capitalists. In this account, US business leaders — aghast at the combination of historically tight labor markets and low fertility rates — are pushing abortion bans to secure an adequate supply of workers and consumers. Abortion restrictions are not only class warfare in the sense that their consequences fall most heavily on poor women, but in that the impetus behind them stems directly from capitalists’ class interests.

But while bringing capitalist political economy into the abortion debate is undoubtedly necessary, the “labor supply” argument is a spurious one. It misses that abortion bans are an inefficient means to control the labor supply and fails to explain why so many women in US society have a deep investment in antiabortion politics. Instead, the key to understanding the “pro-life” movement is grasping how capitalism creates inequality between men and women (as well as among women), and the politics that flow from this. Antiabortion politics aren’t ultimately a capitalist plot. But they are a consequence of the brutal inequalities capitalism creates.