Do Innovations in Birth Control Technology Increase the Welfare of Women?

Birth control pills and legal abortions enable single women to participate in sexual activity with much lower risk of unwanted pregnancy or childbearing. The standard view is that these innovations increase opportunities for women and therefore increase their welfare. An alternative view is that these innovations cause more single women to participate in sexual activities, reducing the bargaining power of women in marriage. This paper investigates both views in an integrated model. When the predictions of the model on the average age of first marriage and the number of never married individuals are consistent with behavior in the US since the seventies, the standard view is correct, that improvements in birth control technology increase the welfare of women. Across states and years variation in access to legal abortions and birth control pills show that easier access to reproductive control technologies did not increase, and may have reduced, the out-of-wedlock birth rate. ∗ I thank SSHRC for financial support. I also thank Julan Al-Yassin and Jasmin Kantarevic for research assistance, Shannon Seitz and seminar participants at the AEA meetings, HKUST, SUNY at Buffalo for useful comments. Do Innovations in Birth Control Technology Increase the Welfare of Women? In the United States, legal abortions and birth control pills became widely available to single women in the seventies. How did these innovations in birth control technology affect the welfare of American women? The conventional wisdom among economists is that these innovations increased the choices available to women and therefore enhanced their welfare (E.g. Cook, et. al. (1999), Kane and Staiger (1996), Lundberg and Plotnick (1995)). Goldin and Katz (2000) provide a nice application of this reasoning. They argue that when birth control pills became widely available to single women, they could be sexually active and not have to worry about unwanted pregnancy. A cost of postponing marriage, either sexual abstinence or sexual activity and the threat of unwanted pregnancy, was removed. Single women became more likely to postpone marriage and accumulate more human capital. Goldin and Katz show that the rise in the entry rates of women into graduate and professional schools in the seventies coincided with the increasing availability of the pill in the United States. In their provocative paper, Akerlof, Yellin and Katz (1996; hereafter AYK) provide a less optimistic view of these innovations in birth control technology. They argue that the availability of legal abortions reduced the bargaining power of women in marriage. Without legal abortion, men who wanted to have sex with their partners had to offer to marry their partners. With legal abortions, many women became willing to be sexually active without demanding marriage in return. The increase in the supply of sexually active single women 1 Marks (2001), Solinger (1998), and Tone (1997, 2001) provide social histories of the development and impact of these technologies.