MATERNAL MORTALITY EFFECTS OF ABORTION LEGALIZATION

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's description): This project will analyze the effect of abortion legality and funding on maternal mortality. The effects of the legal availability of abortion is the subject of much on-going debate, yet despite the emotional salience and public health importance of maternal mortality, there has been surprisingly little research on this issue to date. Previous work suffers from three principal difficulties: It has not solved the measurement problem of under-reporting of illegal abortions in cause of death data; it has failed to take into account the effects of behavioral responses to legalization such as changed fertility; and it has not controlled adequately for unobservables, such as health technology and the disease environment, which may be correlated with legalization. To address the first two difficulties, this project will analyze mortality from all causes of death among all women of childbearing age. The second problem will be addressed by exploiting the variation across states in the timing of abortion legalization and funding changes between 1960 and 1992, using a "difference-in-differences" approach. A secondary methodological aim will exploit the fact that male mortality should be virtually unaffected by changes in abortion's legal availability, in order to explore the extent to which this increasingly popular difference-in-differences methodology adequately controls for unobserved confounders correlated with state policy changes.