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

描述(由申请者提供)：该项目将探讨年轻妇女获得口服避孕药具的历史性变化如何影响妇女及其子女的健康。在20世纪60年代和70年代，大多数州改变了年轻未婚女性在未经父母同意的情况下获得口服避孕药(避孕药)处方的年龄。这些政策变化造成了女性是否可以跨州和跨时间获得避孕药的显着差异。调查人员将利用从许多现成来源获得的数据进行回归分析，利用在不同地点和时间获得避孕药的这种差异，研究早期合法获得避孕药对年轻妇女及其子女的各种与健康有关的结果是如何影响的。对于年轻女性，调查人员将研究早期合法获得避孕药对年轻女性生育、堕胎或成为单身母亲的可能性有何影响。关于年轻妇女的子女，调查人员将审查产妇服用避孕药如何影响儿童死亡率和出生体重，以及产妇服用避孕药如何影响儿童在单亲家庭、贫困家庭或在依靠福利或公共援助的家庭长大的可能性。这一研究项目的发现将对研究人员和政策制定者都具有重要意义。据调查人员所知，在任何学科中，都没有利用节育的历史扩散来研究其与堕胎的关系；这两种生育控制技术之间的联系仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。此外，大量经济学研究表明，堕胎对儿童的生活环境和福祉产生了重要影响，但这些工作提出了一个尚未得到解答的问题，即获得避孕药--近代史上的重大生育控制创新和美国最受欢迎的避孕方式--是否也影响了儿童的结局。调查人员将在所有这些问题上做出重大贡献。此外，该项目将有助于阐明当前有关人口统计历史趋势的政策辩论，例如1970年代年轻妇女中单身母亲的增加。这一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其相关。该项目将探讨获得口服避孕药具如何影响年轻妇女及其子女的健康结果。我们将重点研究避孕对直接与公共健康相关的结果的影响，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对这些影响进行了辩论；因此，我们的研究将有助于政策和公共卫生方面的一个关键领域的工作。

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.