Pregnancy & Policy: An Analysis of State-level Abortion Policy Hostility and Pregnancy Intention
Julia Eddelbuettel1, Sharon Sassler1
1Cornell University

An increasingly hostile policy climate has reshaped abortion access in the U.S. Recent literature has studied the effects of these restrictive policies on reproductive health outcomes. This study is the first to investigate the association between state-level abortion policy hostility and pregnancy intention among pregnancies resulting in live birth. Data are from the PRAMs survey, merged with a state-level legislative database from 2012-2018. Preliminary results reveal that a one unit increase in abortion hostility is associated with a 3.51 percentage point increase in the likelihood of having an unintended versus intended pregnancy that results in live birth (β=0.0351; SE=0.00807), representing a 12.1% increase in unintended pregnancies from the baseline mean rate of 29%. Models stratified by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics reveal that the association between abortion hostility and unintended pregnancy that results in live birth is particularly robust among women in racial minority, rural, and uninsured populations.