The Effect of COVID-19 Restrictions on Abortion Clinic Visits
Due to COVID-19, 33 states banned elective medical procedures, and 13 of these states included surgical abortions. We collected street addresses of abortion clinics and linked them to SafeGraph’s data on visitor counts. We found at least a 6 percent decrease in clinic visits in February-May 2020 versus 2019. States that banned elective procedures or imposed other measures (i.e., stay-at-home orders) saw a substantial additional decrease. There was also a significant additional decrease from explicit surgical abortions bans, driven entirely by clinics that provided surgical abortions. Additionally, elective procedure bans reduce abortion reduce abortion clinic visits in both states hostile to abortion and supportive of abortion, suggesting our results would still hold in some states in a post-Roe U.S. We estimate that the decrease in foot traffic over these four months reduced abortions by 6 percent in 2020 relative to 2019.
Date: 16 June 2022, 16:00 (Thursday, 8th week, Trinity 2022)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room C or Register for online
Speaker: David Slusky (University of Kansas)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Health Economics Seminar
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdeiurjspG9JjEkdCZnET3YPW_7zrVALw
Audience: Public
Editor: Emma Heritage