Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the "Marginal Child?"

Abstract

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The Power of the Pill for the Next Generation: Oral Contraception's Effects on Fertility, Abortion, and Maternal and Child Characteristics

“…i This contrasts with the large amount of work on the effects of access to abortion on fertility and children’s outcomes. These studies show that access to legal abortion reduces fertility in the short term (Levine et al, 1999; Angrist and Evans, 1999) and long term (Ananat, Gruber, and Levine, 2007), improves the living circumstances of the average child (Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, 1999) and improves the adult characteristics of the cohorts who are born to these women. ii These results raise the question of whether the introduction of the pill—the other major fertility control innovation in recent history and the most popular form of contraception in the United States—to young (under age 21) unmarried women had similar effects on fertility and child circumstances, and whether the pill serves as a substitute or complement to abortion when both are available.…”

Do Family Planning Programs Decrease Poverty? Evidence from Public Census Data

“…Our analysis integrates the approach of Gruber, Levine and Staiger (1999), who study the impact of legalizing abortion on children’s economic resources, and Bailey (2012), who studies the impact of funding family planning programs on fertility rates. We use three separate datasets to document effects at different stages by race: Vital Statistics data on fertility rates by race; the 1980 decennial census which contains information on poverty rates among the affected cohorts in childhood; and a pooled sample of the 2000 decennial census and 2005–11 American Community Surveys (ACS) which contains information on poverty rates among the affected cohorts in adulthood.…”

The Effect of Anti-Abortion Legislation on Nineteenth Century Fertility

“…At the same time, scholars have shown renewed interest in nineteenth and early twentieth century fertility patterns, both in terms of the fertility transition when the United States experienced one of the world's largest declines in fertility, and in terms of women's access to fertility control (e.g., Bailey 2010; Guinnane 2011). Although good estimates are available on the effects of access to fertility control on twentieth century populations in the United States (e.g., Bailey 2010, 2012; Gruber et al 1999; Levine 2004; Levine et al 1999; and many others) and in modern developing countries (see Guinnane 2011 for a literature review), supply-side hypotheses are largely absent from the nineteenth century U.S. fertility transition literature (Guinnane 2011; Haines 1986, 1987; Haines and Guest 2008), with a few exceptions (David and Sanderson 1986; Degler 1980; Haines and Hacker 2006; Reed 1978; Sanderson 1979; Tolnay and Guest 1984; Wahl 1986). This article brings these literatures together, examining the effect on fertility of legislation controlling access to legal abortion in the nineteenth century.…”