COVID-19 Restrictions Reduced Abortion Clinic Visits, Even in Blue States / Martin Andersen, Sylvia Bryan, David Slusky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Andersen, Martin.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bryan, Sylvia.

Slusky, David.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28058.

NBER working paper series no. w28058

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

Due to COVID-19, 33 states banned elective medical procedures, and 13 of these states included surgical abortions. We collected street addresses of abortion clinics and linked them to SafeGraph's data on visitor counts. We found at least a 6% decrease in clinic visits in February-May 2020 versus 2019. States that banned elective procedures or imposed other measures (e.g., stay-at-home orders) saw a substantial additional decrease (18.5% and 24.1%, respectively). There was also a significant additional 12.7% decrease from explicit surgical abortions bans, driven entirely by clinics that provided surgical abortions. Additionally, elective procedure bans reduce abortion clinic visits even in states supportive of abortion, suggesting our results are salient even in a post-Roe U.S. We estimate that the decrease in foot traffic over these four months reduced abortions by 7% in 2020 relative to 2019, or approximately 32,000 fewer abortions.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2020.