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Annual Review of Public Health

Volume 46, 2025

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

  • Caitlin Myers1,2
  • 1Department of Economics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, USA; email: [email protected] 2National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  • Vol. 46:433-446 (Volume publication date April 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 30, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The era was hardly a monolith. For more than 50 years—beginning with abortion reforms in the 1960s and continuing through the decision in 2022—state regulations of abortion were neither uniform nor consistent. States reformed and repealed abortion bans leading up to the decision in 1973. Following , 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- era, considering to what extent evidence from the past foretells the future.

Keyword(s): abortion policy, causal inference, natural experiments
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From Roe to Dobbs: 50 Years of Cause and Effect of US State Abortion Regulations
Annual Review of Public Health 46, 433 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071823-122011
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071823-122011
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071823-122011
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