Fertility Consequences of Tightening Abortion Legislation

Anna Matysiak, University of Warsaw
Lucas van der Velde , University of Warsaw

In 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal declared that abortions on the grounds of fetus anomaly were against the constitution. The ruling effectively outlawed abortions, as over 95% of legal abortions were conducted on this ground. Using vital statistics and a regression discontinuity design, we study how the ruling affected fertility. We find that the change in the legislation resulted in a fall in overall fertility of around 4% of the previous mean. This decline was visible across regions, and it was of a similar magnitude for urban and rural settings. We further show that regions that were initially more opposed to abortion experienced smaller fertility declines. We do find only weak evidence of differential effects based on mother's characteristics.

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 Presented in Session 10. Contextual Factors for Fertility