In recent years, states have become increasingly restrictive when it comes to legal access to abortion. One interest of this legislation was to provide further support and resources for pregnancy and parenthood. To investigate how effective these laws were from a public health perspective, a group of researchers from Princeton University and the University of California, San Francisco, conducted a study on the relationship between restrictions on abortions and the birth rate.
The research team analyzed nearly 4 million California births between 2001 and 07. During this time period, the state had nearly 640,000 abortions. In total, researchers identified 63 restrictions on abortion in the state.
They found that additional restrictions were added in California approximately every year and a half. In total, five new restrictions were adopted during the study period. About 3% associated with a decrease in the number of abortions, the researchers estimated.
However, the team found that for the birth rate, every additional restriction resulted in a 0.5 percentage point increase in the number of births several years later. According to the authors, after six years, this would lead to an additional 2,800 births in the state.
The authors stated that the increase in births would be predominantly for poorer and less educated women, who were already most affected by the restrictions.
“Women who are poor and less-educated, and are not able to move away from the state, are more likely to experience the effects of these policies,” study lead author Natalya Kumova of Princeton said in a press release. The study was published in the journal Annals in the “Conversation”.
Although California researchers focused solely on the Golden State for the study, some experts say the results could have implications for the rest of the country.
Study co-author Stanene Lam, a professor of epidemiology at UC San Francisco, told Reuters that similar outcomes could also apply to other states that have loosened access to abortions under restrictive legislation, such as Missouri and Louisiana, among others.
Another co-author, Gouri Shah, an associate professor of economics at Princeton, asserted that although California and other states making it more difficult to get abortions have a limited impact on the national birth rate, they can significantly affect the individual experience for those who cannot afford to travel far.
Kumova also noted that the discrepancy between wealthy and poor women often mirrors pre-Roe v. Wade era, when women with means could afford a multi-state abortion travel, but low-income women could not afford the procedures. Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalized abortion across the United States.
The study was also published Wednesday in the journal Annals.
More than 80% of U.S. counties did not have an abortion provider in 2017, according to a Guttmacher Institute report published that same year.
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