Regulations regarding abortion are often highly controversial. But what kind of impact do they actually have? Caitlin Myers has said that these issues are “from” egg In dobbs: The causes and consequences of 50 years of US abortion restrictions.” (Annual Review of Public Health 2025, pp. 433-446).
As a starting point, consider the years before and after the 1973 US Supreme Court decision. Roev. Wade It has broken existing abortion restrictions nationwide. The left panel shows the states that previously abolished abortion ban egg In purple, people who were relaxed but did not rule out the ban before egg It’s pink and abortion legalized egg gray. In the purple state, which already abolished the abortion ban, the number of abortions had increased in the years before the ROE, but it began to decline and continued to decline after the passage of the ROE. Part of the reasons for the decline in early settlement status is eggwomen had to travel from other states where abortion was illegal anymore. Other groups in the state will see an increase in the number of abortions.
As Myers argues, the impact on the abortion levels in countries that abolished abortion ban prior to 1973 is very large, perhaps greater than the increase in abortions after the ROE decision. She writes:
Of the three broad policy changes that liberalize abortion access, reform, early abolition and abolition egg-It is an early abolition that has the biggest impact on national abortion and fertility rates. As Joyce et al. (51) Following a detailed analysis of the effects of distance to early abolition, “The story that emerged from these data is…Roev. Wade It was probably less important to unintended birth than access to services in California, the District of Columbia, and in particular New York. egg(pp. 813–14) Because so many people were able to travel to these early abolitions, even if their residency had not yet legalized abortion.
States then tested the limits of what the Supreme Court would allow with a variety of restrictions: mandatory waiting periods before an abortion, mandatory counseling before an abortion, different types of content that might be involved in that counseling, parental permission for teenager and/or spousal permission for wives, whether Medicaid funding could be used to pay for abortions, whether abortions needed to be performed in or near hospitals, what doctors were allowed to perform abortions, and others. This set of rules provides a rich set of context for researchers, whether proposed, passed or failed in Congress and endorsed by the court.
This is an example. In North Carolina in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a state fund to pay for abortions for low-income women. Thus, the state did not attract the federal Medicaid fund to pay for abortions. But the state funds sometimes ran out of money. Myers wrote:twenty five) Taking advantage of natural experiments conducted within North Carolina between 1980 and 1994, the state abortion fund ran out of money on five different occasions. The author compares the changes in outcomes of women seeking funds for abortion and concludes that if funding is not available, about a third of the completed pregnancies will be transported to the term instead…”
This type of research is called “natural experiments.” So there was no plan for the North Carolina fund to run out of money. It appears unlikely that North Carolina sexual activity is adjusted according to the fund’s status. Instead, some North Carolina women seeking abortion found funds available, while others didn’t, which affected their resignation.
Myers will provide in detail when examining the sequences of natural experiments analyzed. For example, when a state changed its abortion law, women who lived relatively close to that state were also affected. Because women living far from that state were more expensive to travel to that state, and living far from that state was unaffected. As another example, those interested in applying statistical methods of differences, for example, may want to check out the paper.
Here we will mention some of the final lines of this investigation into evidence (the quotes are omitted here, but they are published in the article itself): If abortion is more restricted, the birth rate will be higher. Increased fertility rates, particularly among women at younger ages, are associated with lower levels of educational outcomes and thus permanent effects on employment outcomes. These effects are usually greater in white women than in black women.
What is the period since the 2022 US Supreme Court decision? Dobbsv. Jacksonit was hit Roev. Wade So did you give the state a much wider latitude when setting up abortion laws? Of course, the evidence on this point is still evolving, and the abortion setting is quite different from before 1973. Myers said:
- “Abortion 12 weeks ago” Pregnancy remains legal in 34 states (65) And many states are increasing protection (twenty two), provided more destinations than existed in 1971, and abortion was legal in six jurisdictions. ”
- “Abortion services have also evolved. A major shift occurred when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug mifepristone for the end of pregnancy. The rate of medication abortions increased rapidly from 6% of all pregnancies in 2001 to 39% in 2017.”
- “[I]n December 2021 FDA has raised restrictions forever (55) to allow healthcare providers to distribute directly to patients through the patient without requiring patients to consult in person or undergo examinations (85). This has expanded abortion access in 32 states that did not restrict telehealth abortions (5), possibly by the end of 2023, it could drive the rise in medication abortions to 63% of all abortions by 2023.83), and the country’s abortions were actually rising compared to beforehand.dobbs level…”
- “Even so, no one seeking an abortion can find a way to drive hundreds of miles to reach non-city facilities, or feel that telehealth abortion is an acceptable option. dobbs It is estimated that the average increase in 2.3% in banned births.26). The estimated effect of bans on fertility is the biggest distance, with a state that reaches 4.4% in Mississippi and 5.0% in Texas…”
In addition, The teenage birth rate has dropped dramatically over the past 30 years For a variety of reasons that are not directly related to the availability of abortion: reduced sexual activity, more use of contraception, more widely, more young women consider the early adulthood as an age of education and work experience, and subsequent age of age of childbirth.
