Primary Submission Category: Application in Public Health
Estimating the Effects of Roe v. Wade Being Overturned on State-Level Abortion Rates
Authors: Flavia Jiang, Brian Cho, Kyuseong Choi, Raaz Dwivedi, Kyra Gan,
Presenting Author: Flavia Jiang*
This study investigates the causal impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and returned abortion regulation to individual states. Using the inclusive synthetic control method, we analyze changes in yearly state-level abortion rates, defined as the number of legal abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 by state of residence. Outcome data were sourced from the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, carefully integrated and supplemented with seven manually selected covariates to prevent overfitting. A key challenge was identifying the treated states, given the complex interplay of direct and spillover effects resulting from the varied state abortion policies. To address this, we used the Predictability, Computability, and Stability framework to estimate effects under perturbed assumptions about the treatment group. We find that the Dobbs decision consistently decreased abortion rates in states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana, while increasing rates in states like Nevada, Illinois, and Delaware across assumption perturbations. Further, the Dobbs decision caused the aggregate abortion rate across 45 states of interest to rise by 0.6% to 2.1% in 2023. These results highlight the nuanced public health impacts of Dobbs, though interpretation should be cautious given data and methodological limitations.