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February 4, 2006
The economics of abortion
Jane Galt, the writer over at Asymmetrical information, has a wonderful analysis of the economics of the decision to have an abortion. Let us say you agree with Clinton's famous position that abortions be safe, legal, and rare, but not as a family planning method. Instead, you would want couples to do their family planning with birth control, using abortion for its failures, as well as rape, incest, and say fatally disabled fetuses. Maybe you have a different standard, but bear with me. Let us also say you buy into price theory, that when the price of something goes down, mostly people consume more of it. You end up with a two-stage decision.
1) Should I use birth control during intercourse
2) Should I have an abortion if I conceive a fetus
One theory of why women have marginal abortions is that contraceptives are too expensive (financially, discomfort, or just too much work) or in or potential users are simply too stigmatized against and uneducated in their use. Under this theory, the major way to reduce the sort of abortions you prefer to avoid is to educated young people that intercourse with contraceptives is good as a moral matter, reasonable to expect from your partner and made affordable by free or discounted distribution by the state and charities.
If one accepts that the inclination to have sex is independent from the state you live in (not caused by it), we can see if red states (where presumably such things still have stigma, and contraceptives slightly less readily available) have abortion rates higher than the blue states (which have more permissive attitudes and wider distribution of contraceptives) do. It turns out that they do not. Nevertheless, read her article to see the full analysis.
A criticism of her work stems from her measurement of abortion frequency as abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age. If the blue states have a radically different rate of sexual activity, say because people from the more traditional states avoid intercourse out of marriage, then this would understate the role of contraceptives in the low abortion rates of the red states. Instead, it should be the number of abortions per 1,000 sexually active women. A few quick looks on Google suggests this data is not readily available, but it might bias the whole analysis. If you what I could find, the births to unwed mothers as a proxy, But it turns out the states with the highest levels of abortion, in addition to being the most liberal) also have highest level of out of wedlock births. Which suggests that they also have the highest levels out-of-wedlock-sex, because they also have the highest abortion rates.
I ran a multiple regression, with % of births to unmarried women (PBUW)and voting for bush in 2004 as the independent variable, and abortion rate as the dependant variable. Both were statistically significant. The factor PBUW had a positive coefficient. It showed a 1% rise in PBUW was correlated with 1 extra abortion per thousand women of child bearing age (TWCBA). Voting for Bush had a negative coefficient. A state that voted for Bush had ten fewer abortions per TWCBA. This is consistent with the theory that premarital sexual activity drives abortions, and that whatever cultural values are associated with a propensity to vote for Bush, they are actually driving down abortion despite a lower presumed availability of contraceptives.
Posted by OneEyedMan at February 4, 2006 4:08 PM
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