52-60 Ribar

Family Planning Perspectives effects of family planning programs on rates of births and abortions; and incentives for out-of-wedlock childbearing attributed to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. These questions reflect more general but perhaps less widely publicized issues that are well suited to economic analysis, such as the cost and accessibility of reproductive health services and changes in women’s and men’s economic opportunities. Economic models are particularly useful for sorting out the determinants of reproductive behavior in the United States because of the substantial heterogeneity that characterizes not only the population’s values and preferences, but also its economic resources and access to different types of health care.* Accordingly, economists have conducted numerous empirical studies of the socioeconomic and political determinants of fertility in the United States. This literature, which is summarized elsewhere,1 has recently expanded to include research on the determinants of abortion.2 While researchers have generally found support for basic economic hypotheses, a number of specific results, including most of the policy questions raised above, remain in dispute. Stephen Matthews is a research associate, Population Research Institute, and Mark Wilhelm is a research associate, Population Research Institute, and an assistant professor of economics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Penn.; David Ribar is an assistant professor of economics, The George Washington University, Washington, D. C. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, San Francisco, Apr. 6–8, 1995. The authors gratefully acknowledge research support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) under grant 1-P30-HD28263-01. David Ribar also acknowledges support from the William T. Grant Foundation and NICHD under grant 1-R01HD30711-01. The authors thank Lynne Ackerman, Denise Duffy, Daniel Henry, HeeSung Kim, Julie Kraut, Gerald Mills and Jeanne Spicer for programming and research assistance; Robert Moffitt and officials at The Alan Guttmacher Institute, National Abortion Federation, National Abortion Rights Action League, National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, National Right to Life Committee and United States Catholic Conference for providing various unpublished data; and Stanley Henshaw, Shelly Lundberg, Mark Roberts, David Shapiro and workshop participants at The Pennsylvania State University for helpful comments. The Effects of Economic Conditions And Access to Reproductive Health Services On State Abortion Rates and Birthrates