Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the 'Marginal Child?',” Quarterly

We examine the impact of increased abortion availability on the average living standards of children through a selection effect. Would the marginal child who was not born have grown up in different circumstances than the average child? We use variation in the timing of abortion legalization across states to answer this question. Cohorts born after legalized abortion experienced a significant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes. We find that the marginal child would have been 40–60 percent more likely to live in a single-parent family, to live in poverty, to receive welfare, and to die as an infant. Access to abortion is one of the most contentious public policy issues facing the United States today. The period since the legalization of abortion under the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 has been marked by incessant debate over the appropriate govern-ment financing and legal status of abortions. Meanwhile, preg-nancy resolution through abortion is a very common outcome in the United States; roughly 25 percent of all pregnancies are aborted [Ventura et al. 1995]. As a result, major changes in abortion access could have substantial effects on the birthrate. Indeed, Levine, Staiger, Kane, and Zimmerman find that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s led to an 8 percent reduction in the birthrate.1 To the extent that abortion access reduces the size of a birth cohort, one question of particular interest from a policy perspec-tive is its effect on the living circumstances of the children who are born. Inherently, this is a question about selection: would those children who were not born because of abortion access have lived in different circumstances than the average child in their cohort? For example, if the women who terminate their births would have borne children into families that were single female-headed or poor or both, then improved abortion access could lead to