Abortion Protections and Mental Health: Evidence from Ohio

• In Event: 40265 - Policies, Politics, and Population Processes

Abstract

Despite the documented negative effects on women’s mental health of abortion restrictions, little research to date has addressed the inverse process: does enacting protections to abortion improve mental health? The timing of the passage of the citizen-initiated constitutional amendment in Ohio provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. Ohio’s amendment passed in the November 2023 general election. Unlike abortion protection ballot measures in other states, this did not occur simultaneously with a major midterm or presidential election, which would add noise to any estimates of mental health taken at that time. The present study uses difference-in-differences methodology to estimate the impact of Ohio’s constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on women’s mental health, using Household Pulse Survey data from 2023 and 2024. The overall aggregated treatment effect for Analy-sis 1, which compared Ohio to all other states, was -0.354 (95% CI: -0.408 to -0.299). The overall aggregated treatment effect for Analysis 2, which compared Ohio to five states who passed constitutional amendments in November 2024, was-0.331 (95% CI: -0.456 to -0.206). To interpret this in the context of other abortion and mental health research, this effect size is 1.5 times the magnitude of the effect size using Household Pulse Survey data reported in Thornburg et al. (2024) of the Dobbs decision, and in the opposite direction. The results of this study indicate that enacting abortion protections can benefit mental health.

Author

• AP Pittman, Duke University