Abortion Access and Inequalities in Reproductive and Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Texas

• In Event: Reproductive Health

Abstract

Education and earnings inequality across gender, race, and socioeconomic status is a critical issue in the United States and globally. Access to effective family planning services has the potential to reduce these dimensions of inequality, as previous research has shown that access to contraception and abortion services can increase women’s labor force participation (Bailey, 2006), reduce the gender wage gap (Bailey, Hershbein, and Miller, 2012), and reduce racial inequality in educational attainment among women (Angrist and Evans, 1999; Jones and Pineda-Torres, 2024). Over the past 60 years, family planning access in the U.S. has generally expanded, with the introduction of the birth control pill (Goldin and Katz 2002), the legalization of abortion (Myers, 2017), and more recently, broader access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (Lindo and Packham 2017).

However, the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson, which overturned Roe vs. Wade, represents the largest single negative shock to family planning access in the history of the United States. Given the established literature, it is likely that the Dobbs decision will increase inequality. However, the extent of the impact, which groups will be most affected, and the precise mechanisms by which the decision will impact inequality remain uncertain.

We study the short- and long-term effects of reduced abortion access on reproductive outcomes and educational attainment using rich administrative data from the state of Texas. We leverage variation in abortion access stemming from the passage of House Bill 2 (HB2) in 2013, which closed approximately half of all abortion clinics in the state, and increased travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic by as much as 200 miles in rural areas (Lindo et al., 2020). We link school-level changes in abortion access to rich administrative data from the public education system that tracks individuals throughout high school and college. These data include high school attendance, completion, and initiation and progress towards a college degree. We supplement these data with hospital discharge records that identify teenage births by mother’s residential zip code, enabling more geographically precise analysis of changes in teen birth rates than previous work done at the county level (Lindo et al., 2020).

Preliminary results indicate births to teenage mothers increased by approximately 10% for residents of zip codes where the distance to the nearest abortion provider rose by more than 50 miles after HB2’s implementation, relative to zip codes without such a large change. Early results also indicate decreased high school completion and college enrollment for female students compared to male students in areas of West Texas hardest hit by clinic closures. Ongoing work investigates the effect of reduced abortion access on educational outcomes including high school degree completion, college initiation, and college completion across the state, using difference-in-differences, synthetic differences, and triple differences models. Future work will also investigate heterogeneity of these impacts by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Authors

• Maranna Yoder, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jiee Zhong, Miami University
  Presenting Author