FAMILY PLANNING WAIVERS AND TEEN FERTILITY Teen pregnancy is widely acknowledged as a serious problem in the United States and finding ways to prevent teen pregnancy is an important public policy goal. One approach that is commonly suggested is to improve access to family planning services. Some states have been experimenting with a policy of precisely this nature under the auspices of their Medicaid programs. These states have recently been granted waivers from the federal government allowing them to extend the provision of Medicaid family planning services to more women. Those waivers that have been granted include policies to expand income eligibility to up to 200 percent of the poverty threshold and to extend the right to family planning services for up to 5 years post-partum. The research we propose will evaluate the role that family planning services may play in reducing teen pregnancies and births by estimating the impact of these Medicaid family planning waivers. The study we propose to conduct will employ an empirical strategy specifically targeted at identifying a causal connection between the additional services provided and fertility outcomes. We plan to use several sources of data in our analysis, including Vital Statistics Natality data, abortion data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and data on sexual behavior and contraceptive use from the National Survey of Family Growth. We will employ quasi- experimental techniques in our analysis, examining birth outcomes as well as its antecedents (sexual activity, contraception, pregnancy, and abortion). We will take advantage of the geographic variation over time in the introduction of the waivers, treating those locations in which no policy change took place as a pseudo-control group to help gauge the causal impact of the policy in those locations that offered additional family planning services. We will also compare outcomes across states and across years for those more likely to be eligible for the waiver programs and those who are less likely to be eligible due to their higher income. We plan to conduct this analysis for all teens and for teens separated by race/ethnicity to determine whether there is a differential impact across groups. ? ? ?
| Kearney, Melissa S; Levine, Phillip B (2009) Subsidized Contraception, Fertility, and Sexual Behavior. Rev Econ Stat 91:137 |
