abortion as insurance

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Mar 9 14:02:13 PST 2002


"Abortion as Insurance"

BY: PHILLIP B. LEVINE

Wellesley College

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

DOUGLAS STAIGER

Dartmouth College

Department of Economics

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=302574

Paper ID: NBER Working Paper No. W8813

Date: March 2002

Contact: PHILLIP B. LEVINE

Email: Mailto:plevine at wellesley.edu

Postal: Wellesley College

106 Central Street

Wellesley, MA 02181 UNITED STATES

Phone: 781-283-2162

Fax: 781-283-2177

Co-Auth: DOUGLAS STAIGER

Email: Mailto:douglas.staiger at dartmouth.edu

Postal: Dartmouth College

Department of Economics

Hanover, NH 03755 UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT:

This paper views abortion access as an insurance policy that

protects women from unwanted pregnancies. Within this framework,

we present a theoretical model where greater access provides

value in the form of insurance against unwanted births and also

reduces the incentive to avoid pregnancy. This model predicts

that legalized abortion should lead to a reduction in the

likelihood of giving birth. It also predicts that if abortion

access becomes relatively inexpensive (including both monetary

and psychic costs), then pregnancies would rise and births would

remain unchanged or may even rise as well. We review the

evidence on the impact of changes in abortion policy mainly from

the United States and find support for both predictions. Then we

test these hypotheses using recent changes in abortion policy in

several Eastern European countries. We find that countries which

changed from very restrictive to liberal abortion laws

experienced a large reduction in births, highlighting the

insurance value. Changes from modest restrictions to abortion

available upon request, however, led to no such change in births

despite large increases in abortions, indicating that

pregnancies rose as well. These findings are consistent with the

incentive effect implications of our model.

JEL Classification: I18, J13



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