Abortion Legalization And Life-Cycle Fertility By Elizabeth Ananat

The article “Abortion Legalization and Life-Cycle Fertility” written by Elizabeth Ananat, Jonathan Gruber, and Phillip Levine accentuates the concept of abortion being legalized in five states that occurred in the year of 1970. Three years after legalizing abortion, all states in America have become legal because of the Roe v. Wade case. Moreover, the article emphasizes the dilemma that there was an extensive decrease in fertility due to the notion of legalizing abortion. Elizabeth Ananat who is one of the authors of this article has received a Ph.D. in 2006 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for economics and is an assistant professor at Duke University. Jonathan Gruber has received a medal of the American Society of Health Economists

As to the pivotal controversy, it is whether women who were born in disparate states and birth cohorts had different fertility patterns than to those who were born in states that legalized abortion early before the Roe v. Wade case. Archival resources that comprise of the “1970 U.S. Census” and “data from the Vital Statistics Natality Detail Files between 1968 and 1999” were utilized throughout the article to support the contention (Ananat et al., 2007). The data from these two resources has permitted the authors to determine the “lifetime fertility” of women “in cohorts” born between the years of 1930 and 1960 (Ananat et al., 2007). Yet, the methodology of this article is to “convert the focus on period effects” to a “focus on cohort effects” in which the authors employed the quasi-experiment (Ananat et al., 2007). This experiment portrays an empirical evaluation to conclude the impact on a selected group of women who were influenced by the alterations in abortion law. The findings from this experiment were that the legalization of abortion had influenced the women that were “aged 16-26” and the “availability of abortion in the repeal states” had led to a decline in “permanent fertility” (Ananat et al., 2007). Therefore, statistics indicate that the notion of legalizing abortion has imperatively impacted the fertility of women in the