From Roe to Dobbs: 50 Years of Cause and Effect of US State Abortion Regulations

The Roe era was hardly a monolith. For more than 50 years—beginning with abortion reforms in the 1960s and continuing through the Dobbs decision in 2022—state regulations of abortion were neither uniform nor consistent. States reformed and repealed abortion bans leading up to the Roe decision in 1973. Following Roe, they enacted both demand-side regulations of people seeking abortions and supply-side regulations of people providing abortions. The resulting laboratory of state policies affords natural experiments that have yielded evidence on the effects of abortion regulations on demographic, health, economic, and other social outcomes. I present a brief history of state policy variation from 1967 through 2016 and review the empirical scholarship studying its effects. This literature demonstrates that the liberalization of abortion access in the 1960s and 1970s allowed women greater control over their fertility, resulting in increased educational attainment and earnings. Subsequent state restrictions in the 1980s through 2010s had the opposite effect, particularly when they increased the financial and logistical costs of obtaining an abortion. I conclude with a discussion of implications for the post-Dobbs era, considering to what extent evidence from the past foretells the future.