The Impact of Early Access to Oral Contraception on the Health of Women and Child

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目将探讨年轻妇女获得口服避孕药的历史性变化如何影响妇女及其子女的健康。在1960年代和1970年代，大多数州改变了年轻未婚女性可以在未经父母同意的情况下获得口服避孕药（“药丸”）处方的年龄。这些政策变化在妇女是否可以在不同的州和时间获得避孕药方面产生了重大差异。利用对来自许多现成来源的数据进行回归分析，研究人员将利用这种在不同地点和时间获得避孕药的差异来研究早期法律的获得避孕药如何影响年轻妇女及其子女的各种健康相关结果。关于年轻女性，研究人员将研究早期法律的获得避孕药的可能性如何影响年轻女性分娩，堕胎或成为单身母亲。关于年轻妇女的孩子，研究人员将研究母亲获得避孕药如何影响儿童死亡率和出生体重，以及母亲获得避孕药如何影响孩子在单亲家庭，贫困家庭或福利或公共援助家庭中长大的可能性。该研究项目的结果将对研究人员和政策制定者具有重要意义。研究人员不知道任何学科的工作，利用节育的历史传播来研究其与堕胎的关系;这两种节育技术之间的联系仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。此外，大量的经济学研究表明，堕胎对儿童的生活环境和福祉有重要影响，但这项研究提出了一个尚未回答的问题，即获得避孕药-近代历史上主要的生育控制创新和美国最流行的避孕形式-是否也影响了儿童的结局。调查人员将对所有这些问题作出重大贡献。此外，该项目将有助于阐明目前关于历史性人口趋势的政策辩论，例如1970年代年轻妇女中单身母亲的增加。该项目所需的数据很容易获得，目前正在进行初步研究。 公共卫生相关性：该项目与公共卫生极为相关。该项目将探讨获得口服避孕药如何影响年轻妇女及其子女的健康结果。我们将重点关注避孕对与公共卫生直接相关的结果的影响，包括堕胎，儿童死亡率和儿童的各种社会经济特征。研究人员和政策制定者一直在讨论这些影响;因此，我们的研究将有助于政策和公共卫生工作的一个关键领域。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will explore how historic changes in young women's access to oral contraception affected the health of women and their children. During the 1960s and 1970s, most states changed the age at which young unmarried women could obtain a prescription for oral contraception ("the pill") without their parents' consent. These policy changes created significant variation in whether women could obtain the pill across states and time. Using regression analysis on data taken from a number of readily available sources, the investigators will exploit this variation in access to the pill across place and time to examine how early legal access to the pill impacted various health-related outcomes of young women and their children. Regarding young women, the investigators will examine how early legal access to the pill affected the likelihood that a young woman gave birth, obtained an abortion, or became a single mother. Regarding the children of young women, the investigators will examine how maternal access to the pill affected child mortality and birth weight, and how maternal access to the pill affected the likelihood that a child grew up in a single parent household, in an impoverished household, or in a household on welfare or public assistance. The findings of this research project will be significant for both researchers and policy makers. The investigators know of no work in any discipline that exploits birth control's historic diffusion to examine its relationship with abortion; the connection between these two fertility control technologies remains an open question. Moreover, a large body of work in economics suggests that access to abortion had important impacts on children's living circumstances and wellbeing, but this work raises the as-yet unanswered question of whether access to the pill-the major fertility control innovation in recent history and the most popular form of contraception in the United States-also affected childhood outcomes. The investigators will make significant contributions to all of these issues. Moreover, the project will help shed light on current policy debates regarding historic demographic trends, such as the rise in single motherhood among young women occurring in the 1970s. The data needed for this project are readily obtainable and preliminary research is currently under way. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project is extremely relevant to public health. The project will explore how access to oral contraception affects the health outcomes of young women and their children. We will focus on contraception's effects on outcomes directly related to public health, including abortion, childhood mortality, and various socioeconomic characteristics of children. These effects have been debated by researchers and policy makers; our study will thus contribute to a key area of work on policy and public health.