The Impact of Restrictive Abortion Policies on the Socioeconomic and Demographic Composition of Mothers -The case of the House Bill 2 regulation in Texas 2013

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper is to explore whether the implementation of the restrictive abortion policy House Bill 2 (HB2) in Texas 2013 impacted the abortion- and birth rates within the state, and whether the policy was associated with a change in the socioeconomic and demographic composition of women giving birth. For the first-stage regressions, state-level yearly panel data and a difference-in-difference framework are used to examine the impact of the policy on abortion- and birth rates. For the second-stage regressions, where we examine whether the establishment of HB 2 had an effect on the socioeconomic and demographic composition of women giving birth, repeated cross-sectional data of mothers in fertile ages in Texas is used, together with a Before-and-after Ordinary Least Squares regression. The results indicate that the implementation of HB 2 was associated with a decrease in the abortion rate, and a slight increase in the birth rate. Moreover, the results from the second-stage regressions imply that women giving birth after the establishment of HB 2 were less likely to be within the labor force, more likely to be below the poverty line and more likely to be teenagers. This paper provides insightful findings concerning which groups of women were more heavily affected by the implementation of HB 2 and a broader understanding of how restrictive abortion policies might unevenly affect specific groups of women, not least in the light of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.