Welfare Reform, Fertility and Reproductive Behavior

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is widely held that an out-of-wedlock birth hinders a woman's ability to achieve financial security and to raise children in a healthy and secure environment. In recent years, beginning first with state governments and culminating in the federal legislation embodied in the Personal and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare policies have been dramatically altered so as to discourage out-of-wedlock birth. Thus, the primary objective of this project is to examine whether key provisions of recent welfare reform policies such as benefit time limits and family cap provisions affected rates of out-of-wedlock birth, abortion and pregnancy among women between the ages of 19 and 35. Importantly, our proposed research will provide evidence as to the effect of welfare reform on abortion, which is of interest not only because it is a significant public health outcome, but also because it is a possible link in the causal chain connecting welfare reform to rates of nonmarital pregnancy and birth. In addition, we will investigate whether recent welfare reform has affected contraception and sexual activity, two other causal links between welfare reform and non-marital pregnancy for which there is no current information. A secondary objective of the proposal will be to collect, under the direction of Dr. Stanley Henshaw, in collaboration with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, individual induced termination records from as many of the 45 states and vital registries that maintain such data. This is a unique and important contribution of our proposal for it represents the first attempt to collect individual data on induced terminations since the National Center for Health Statistics discontinued its effort in 14 states almost a decade ago. These micro-level data on abortions permit a more refined analysis of the effect of public policies on abortion than is possible with abortion data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI).