Programa de Población, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República del Uruguay, Montevideo, 11200, Uruguay.
Centre for Distributive, Labor, and Social Studies (CEDLAS-UNLP, Argentina), National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina), CP(1900) La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Centre for Economic Research (CINVE, Uruguay), Montevideo, 11200, Uruguay.
Stud Fam Plann. 2022 Sep;53(3):491-514. doi: 10.1111/sifp.12204. Epub 2022 Jun 29.
The Latin American and Caribbean adolescent fertility rates are among the highest in the world: about 1.7 million children are born to teen mothers every year, and most of them are declared unintended pregnancies. The region also has the highest rate of unintended pregnancy of any world region, and nearly half of such pregnancies end in abortion. However, fewer than 18 percent of the region's women live in countries where abortion is broadly legal. This paper estimates the causal effect of abortion legalization on adolescent fertility in Uruguay using official data on legal abortions provided after the 2012 reform. We employed a difference-in-differences strategy, classifying states by whether they are responsive or unresponsive to the reform. The results suggest that abortion reform had a negative impact on the adolescent birth rate by 2.5-2.8 births per thousand adolescents aged 15-19 (a 4 percent decrease from the preintervention average). Additionally, we exploited variation in reform implementation intensity through the estimation of fixed-effect linear regression models and found consistent results. Our findings are robust to controlling for a concurrent large-scale program of contraceptive implants. We conclude that legislation aimed at enhancing rights and reducing avoidable deaths and complications from unsafe abortions may also have spillover effects that help reduce adolescent fertility.
每年约有 170 万名儿童是未成年母亲所生，其中大多数属于意外怀孕。该地区也是世界上任何地区意外怀孕率最高的地区，近一半的意外怀孕以堕胎告终。然而，该地区只有不到 18%的妇女生活在堕胎法律广泛允许的国家。本文使用 2012 年改革后提供的关于合法堕胎的官方数据，估计了乌拉圭堕胎合法化对青少年生育率的因果影响。我们采用了差异中的差异策略，根据各州对改革的反应程度进行分类。结果表明，堕胎改革对 15-19 岁青少年的出生率产生了负面影响，每千名青少年减少了 2.5-2.8 次生育（比干预前的平均水平下降了 4%）。此外，我们通过估计固定效应线性回归模型来利用改革实施强度的变化，并得出了一致的结果。我们的研究结果在控制同期大规模避孕植入物方案时仍然成立。我们的结论是，旨在增强权利和减少不安全堕胎造成的可避免死亡和并发症的立法也可能产生溢出效应，有助于降低青少年生育率。
