RESEARCH BRIEF - THE CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONTRACEPTION, ABORTION, AND ECONOMIC WELL-BEING

Instead, they tend to focus on observational changes at the population level or the cost to the government and taxpayers of unintended childbearing.     Recently, several  studies have used complex modeling and quasi-experimental designs to better understand how access to contraception and abortion affects levers of economic well-being at the individual and family levels. [...] The results indicate that the increased access to contraception led to a significant increase in the likelihood of girls graduating high school on time and positively impacted socioeconomic opportunities for years after high school.  Findings include:  • In the first five years of the initiative (2009–2014), there was an increase of 16.5 percentage points in the use of the most effective contracep. [...] It took advantage of the natural experiment of staggered increases in legal abortion access across the states in the 1960s and 1970s to highlight the effects on individual women’s lives. [...] Findings include: • Abortion access had a significant impact on education for women who had pregnancies before the age of 24, increasing the probability of completing college by 72 percent. The findings estimate that missing out on a college degree resulted in a loss of lifetime earnings of $1.286 million.  • For young women who had an unintended pregnancy, access to abortion increased the probabi. [...] The Consequences of Abortion and Contraception Policies on Young Women’s Reproductive Choices, Schooling and Labor Supply9 The aim of this 2017 study was to understand how a series of policies restricting access to abortion, when taken together, go beyond limiting access to abortion to affect women’s other life decisions.