Raj Chetty Quotes
Every extra year you spend in a better environment makes you more likely to go to college, less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, makes you earn more as an adult, makes you more likely to have a stable family situation, be married, for instance, when you're an adult.
Chetty, Raj. "How a Neighborhood Can Influence a Child's Future." Morning Edition, NPR, 6 May 2015.
Some Republicans were concerned about regulations requiring employers who provide health insurance to cover contraceptives could potentially interfere with their religious freedom if they had religious compunctions about birth control, but their proposed solutions would have denied some women in the work force basic medical care as recommended by almost all health authorities. Some of the strongest male opponents of the regulations had a long standing track record as being against birth control of any kind. Many women then rose up to protest what appeared to them as an attempt to roll back their hard won right to control their own body. The issue became a part of almost any discussion involving women, and advocates of providing all of women with birth control rights and availability showed how it tied in with almost every facet of a woman’s like. In this case, being able to go to and finish college and graduate school which becomes much less likely if a woman gives birth to an unplanned child.
This is a brilliant example of political sarcasm to make an important political point. In an effort to evade the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision giving women the right to have an abortion, Virginia and several other very conservative states began to pass laws that put impediments in the way of women wanting abortions and/or increasing the cost and hassle of abortion. Virginia passed legislation requiring physicians who might do aboutions to first council the woman in all the risks and negatives of abortion. The “purpose of the act” was supposedly to protect the woman and her rights. However there was no requirement of a physician to communicate the risks of childbirth and so Virginia by this quotation is exposed by only caring about a woman considering abortion being informed of risk, but not worrying about protecting the pregnant woman who is contemplating birth. Charo takes the Virginia statute and rewrites it to apply to women expecting to give birth and requiring the physicians to describe those risks. In the process of creating a parallel law for women interested in giving birth, Charo then is able to show that with the state of medicine at the early 21st century, it was much more risky to give birth than to have an abortion. Anti-abortion believers rarely say (and many do not even know) that the mother to be risks a higher rate of maternal mortality than the woman who chooses abortion. Abortion foes emphasize the mental health implications of having an abortion, yet there was no scientific evidence that it did. There were MANY research studies, however, that mental health problems are a very real risk of childbirth. (Post Partum depression is quite common when the female hormones radically change during pregnancy and childbirth. And ironically Charo would have the obstetrician warn about the economic and social risks of giving birth, just as the Virginia statute required warnings about abortion.
Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty (born August 4, 1979) is an American economist. He is a professor of economics at Stanford University, specializing in the field of public economics.[2] Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States[3] and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance.[4] Chetty previously taught at Harvard University, where he was offered tenure at the age of 28 and accepted at 29, becoming one of the youngest tenured faculty in the history of Harvard's economics department. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.[5] Currently, he is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Public Economics
