Abortion Bans and Young Women's Labor Supply: Evidence from the Dobbs Decision

Technical Summary: Abortion Bans and Young Women's Labor Supply

Problem and Motivation
Following the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the United States experienced a rapid shift in its reproductive landscape, characterized by the immediate implementation of state-level abortion bans. While existing literature has extensively documented the health, fertility, and longer-term human capital consequences of these policy changes (e.g., Miller et al., 2020; Dench et al., 2024; Kane, 2025), the immediate impact on the labor supply of young women (ages 18–24) remains underexplored.

Theoretically, the loss of reproductive autonomy at a critical stage of human capital accumulation increases the expected cost of unintended pregnancy. Drawing on the framework of Goldin and Katz (2002), which posits that control over childbearing timing facilitates long-term career planning, this paper investigates whether the reversal of this "uncertainty reduction" mechanism forces young women to alter their trade-offs between current work, schooling, and future prospects. Specifically, the paper asks whether restricted access to abortion induces an immediate increase in labor market attachment among young women in ban states.

Data and Empirical Strategy
The study utilizes high-frequency monthly microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS) covering the period from January 2021 to December 2023. The sample is restricted to individuals aged 18–24.

• Treatment and Control Groups: The treatment group consists of 13 states that implemented immediate or "trigger" abortion bans (e.g., Texas, Missouri, Alabama). The control group comprises 8 states that explicitly protected abortion rights (e.g., California, New York). States with ambiguous or delayed legal statuses were excluded to ensure a clean comparison.
• Outcome Variables: The primary outcome is Labor Force Participation (LFP). Secondary outcomes include school enrollment and employment status (EPOP).
• Methodology:
  1. Difference-in-Differences (DiD): The author first estimates standard DiD models separately for young women and young men, comparing ban states to protected states before and after July 2022.
  2. Triple-Difference (DDD): The preferred specification is a DDD model that uses young men within the same states as a control group for young women. This design controls for state-specific economic trends and gender-specific shocks. The model is specified as:
     $$Y_{isgt} = \beta_{DDD}(Treat_s \times Post_t \times Female_g) + \mu_{st} + \psi_{sg} + \phi_{tg} + \epsilon_{isgt}$$
     where $\mu_{st}$ are state-by-month fixed effects, $\psi_{sg}$ are state-by-gender fixed effects, and $\phi_{tg}$ are month-by-gender fixed effects. This saturated set of fixed effects absorbs all lower-order main effects, identifying the coefficient $\beta_{DDD}$ from within-state, within-month differences between young women and young men across the two sets of states.
  • Inference: Standard errors are clustered at the state level, and regressions are weighted using CPS person weights.

Key Results
The analysis yields the following findings regarding the short-run effects (within the first 18 months post-Dobbs):

1. Labor Force Participation (LFP):

   • Simple DiD (Women): Young women in ban states increased their LFP by 3.6 percentage points ($p < 0.05$) relative to young women in protected states.
   • Simple DiD (Men): Conversely, young men in ban states experienced a statistically significant decline in LFP of 2.9 percentage points ($p < 0.05$). This suggests that the increase in female participation is not driven by a general improvement in local labor demand, which appears to have weakened in ban states.
   • Triple-Difference (DDD): Controlling for state-month and gender interactions, the DDD estimate indicates a 6.6 percentage point ($p < 0.05$) increase in LFP for young women in ban states relative to young men in the same states and periods.

2. School Enrollment and Employment:

   • Enrollment: There was no statistically significant immediate drop in school enrollment for young women in ban states. This suggests that the adjustment is occurring at the intensive margin (e.g., combining work and study) or through entry from non-employment, rather than an immediate withdrawal from education.
   • Employment: Employment (EPOP) for young women rose by approximately 3 percentage points, though this estimate is less precise ($p = 0.062$).

3. Event Studies: Event-study plots confirm parallel pre-trends prior to the Dobbs decision and a sustained, sharp increase in LFP for young women in ban states immediately following the ruling.

Significance and Claims
The paper claims to provide the first evidence linking the Dobbs decision to an immediate, measurable change in the labor supply of young women. The findings suggest that restricted reproductive rights are associated with a rapid shift toward current earnings, potentially at the expense of human capital accumulation in the short run.

The author emphasizes that these results capture short-run dynamics and do not speak to longer-run adjustment processes. The observed labor supply response is interpreted as a rational reaction to heightened uncertainty and risk regarding childbearing, potentially driven by economic necessity and weakened bargaining power (given the documented rise in unintended births and intimate partner violence in ban states).

The study complements existing literature on post-Dobbs fertility, contraceptive behavior, and educational sorting by highlighting a new margin of adjustment: the labor market. The paper concludes that Dobbs represents a structural change in the economic environment for young women, necessitating further research into how these immediate labor market shifts interact with future decisions regarding schooling, family formation, and geographic mobility.