Fertility
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 12:15 PM - 2:15 PM (EST)
- Chair: Elizabeth Brainerd, Brandeis University
The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Fertility, Marriage, and Long-Term Outcomes for Women
Abstract
We study the effects of access to abortion on short- and long-term outcomes for women, including fertility, marriage, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes. We exploit the legalization of abortion in Spain in 1985 together with geographic variation in the availability of health centers providing abortion services in the early years after legalization.We construct a new dataset of abortion clinics with their geographical location and years of operation, and follow a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting variation across cohorts and the availability of abortion clinics. We follow women for up to 30 years after the legal reform. We exploit a range of data sources, from administrative birth certificates to labor force survey data, to explore short- and long-term outcomes.
The supply of abortion services in different locations may reflect at least in part demand factors. We provide evidence of parallel trends and control directly for demand factors interacted with year dummies, such that we are plausibly left with idiosyncratic variation in the supply of abortion services.
We find that abortion legalization, combined with living close to an abortion clinic, led to a 6% short-term decline in birth-rates among women under 21. We find a delay in both first birth and marriage. We also find that women more affected by the reform were significantly more likely to graduate from high school.
In the long term, we find that completed fertility was unaffected. Also, treated women are less likely to have ever married, and fewer of them report being divorced, suggesting better-quality matches. We find insignificant effects on long-term labor market outcomes.
Our findings suggest that the legal regulation of abortion can have important implications for women’s lives, affecting the timing of family formation as well as educational attainment, while not lowering completed fertility. Our interpretation is that those effects are overall positive.
COVID-19 and the Future of U.S. Fertility: What Can We Learn from Google?
Abstract
The future effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on birthrates is currently unknown. We use data from Google Trends to predict the dynamic effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on future births at the state-level in the United States. We do this in four steps. First, using time-lagged fixed-effects regression model we show that periods of above-normal search volume for Google keywords relating to conception and pregnancy in US states are associated with higher numbers of births in the following months. Excess searches for unemployment keywords have the opposite effect. Second, by employing simple statistical learning techniques, we demonstrate that including information on keyword search volumes in prediction models significantly improves forecast accuracy over a number of cross-validation criteria. Third, we use data on Google searches during the COVID-19 pandemic to predict changes in aggregate fertility rates in the United States at the state level through February 2021. Our analysis suggests that between November 2020 and February 2021, monthly US births will drop sharply by approximately 15%. Births remain depressed through August 2021, suggesting the potential for an extended “baby bust”. For context, this would be a 50% larger decline than that following the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and similar in magnitude to the declines following the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 and the Great Depression. Finally, we find heterogeneous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across states. States with fewer individuals with a college education, lower household income, and larger minority populations are predicted to have larger declines in fertility due to COVID-19. This finding is consistent with elevated caseloads of COVID-19 in low-income and minority neighborhoods, as well as with evidence suggesting larger economic impacts of the crisis among such households.Blue Cross-Where Do I Go Now? The Role of Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Fertility Decisions
Abstract
Since abortion became legal in the United States, pregnant women have been able to visit Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs). CPCs provide counseling services from a “pro-life” (anti-abortion) perspective. I propose that CPCs, by providing pregnancy related services in local communities, are a missing puzzle piece in our understanding of abortion access and women's fertility outcomes. Across the United States, there are far more CPCs than abortion service providers, which include clinics, hospitals and physicians’ practices. The overall impact of CPCs is potentially significant, and this paper provides the first causal evidence of CPCs on fertility outcomes. How do CPCs shape women’s fertility decisions? The majority of CPCs provide services intended to counsel pregnant women, listed as peer counseling, pregnancy tests, and ultrasound services. Many CPCs also provide adoption referral services. CPCs also alter the supply of abortion services, by competing directly with abortion clinics. Examples of competitive behavior are CPCs locating in geographic proximity of clinics, advertising CPC services in front of abortion clinics, imitating abortion providers' advertising, and leasing the same facilities after abortion clinics close down. This competition between CPCs and abortion clinics suggests that the two need to be studied jointly, which has not previously been done. In this paper, I investigate the mechanisms by which CPCs shape women's utilization of abortion services and the resulting impact on the county-level abortion and birth rates in North Carolina and South Carolina. I instrument for the presence of a CPC using the renewal prediction of CPC openings and find a reduction in the abortion rate among teenage and young women.The Labor Market Returns to Delaying Pregnancy
Abstract
For women, the birth of a new child is associated with large and persistent declines in earnings. These large costs may induce women to invest more in careers which are less affected by childbirth, or to time children to reduce their career. The impact of children on women's careers is central to understanding the gender pay disparities more generally. Unfortunately, causal research on the timing of children is made difficult precisely by the fact that this timing is so important for careers and families---experiments that shift the timing of childbirth are rare. In this paper, we study the career and family outcomes of women who become pregnant while using long-acting reversible birth control, in particular, Inter-Uterine Devices (IUDs) and the birth control shot (DMPA). These methods of birth control are extremely effective, but not perfect -- about 0.5% of women using a non-expired IUD will get pregnant in a year, resulting in a natural experiment in which women who had hoped to delay childbirth become pregnant earlier than they expected. Our data come from Swedish hospital and administrative tax records which link medical prescriptions for birth control, out-patient doctor visits, infant health records, and labor market information for all women in Sweden. We find that relative to women who do not get pregnant and are able to successfully delay childbirth (the control group), those who become accidentally pregnant while on long acting birth control suffer persistent earnings losses. The control group is composed of women who had long acting birth control prescriptions at the same time as the treatment group, but who only became pregnant later, at a potentially more strategic time. We estimate the causal effect of accidental pregnancy on earnings of about 20% even six years after becoming pregnant, relative to the control group.JEL Classifications
- J1 - Demographic Economics