The primary objective of the proposed study is to estimate the separate effect of legal access to induced abortion and the birth control pill on teen fertility in the early 1970s. The study is novel because we have obtained never-before-used data on induced abortions performed in New York State by age, race, gestational age and state of residence from 1971 to 1975. To appreciate the significance of these data and the importance of early legalization of abortion in New York on teen fertility, we use Florida as an example and show in the application that there were 10.5 abortions per 1000 teen residents of Florida obtained in New York in 1971. In absolute numbers, 3,198 teens from Florida traveled approximately 1200 miles to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in 1971. To understand the magnitude of Florida's teen abortion rate in 1971-a state and year in which abortion was illegal-we note that in 2002 the teen abortion rate in the entire U.S. was 21.7. The study makes two contributions with these data. The first provides new estimates of the determinants of teen birth and abortion rates in the early 1970s, a period of dramatic change in reproductive laws and policies. We will use the natural experiment afforded by the legalization of abortion in 1970 in a few states and then national legalization in 1973 to estimate the effect of access to abortion services on teen abortion and births rates controlling for access to the pill. A second contribution concerns the recent and growing body of work that can be loosely labeled the """"""""power of the pill."""""""" The idea is that access to the pill among unmarried teens in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a substantial effect on teen fertility. Women from the affected cohorts achieved greater educational attainment, increased representation in professional occupations, and experienced fewer divorces than cohorts that were unexposed. However, researchers of these studies did not effectively account for the availability of legal abortion on teen fertility in the years prior to Roe and as a result, likely overestimated the impact of the pill on teen fertility. In this study we will combine induced terminations in New York to non-residents of the state with abortion surveillance data from 1970-1975 from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate resident teen abortion rates by state from 1970 to 1975. We will use distance to the nearest legal abortion provider before and after Roe to assess the importance of access on teen abortion rates adjusted for access to the pill. We will use these data in regressions of teen fertility rates over the same period to estimate the relative contribution of access to abortion and the pill to teen fertility.
Over 80 percent of pregnancies to teens are currently characterized as unintended. These figures suggest that induced abortion remains a significant option for many U.S. teens. The legalization of abortion in US occurred 36 years ago. Nevertheless, the dramatic change in the availability of abortion and contraceptive services in the early 1970s provides an important natural experiment with which to identify the effect of access to both abortion and the pill on teen fertility with important implications as to the determinants of fertility control among teens today.
| Joyce, Ted; Tan, Ruoding; Zhang, Yuxiu (2013) Abortion before & after Roe. J Health Econ 32:804-15 |
| Joyce, Ted (2013) How important was the Pill to women's economic well-being? If Roe v. Wade were overturned, how might society change? J Policy Anal Manage 32:879-87 |
| Joyce, Ted (2013) If only policy analysis were so easy. J Policy Anal Manage 32:897-9 |
