Emma Reinsch

Topic

The Economics of U.S. Reproductive Policy: Evidence Across Five Decades

Department of Economics

Date & location

• Thursday, February 19, 2026
• 10:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B021

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Donn Feir, Department of Economics, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Justin Wiltshire, Department of Economics, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Laura Parisi, Department of Genders Studies, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Caitlin Myers, Department of Economics, Middlebury College

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Jane Butterfield, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UVic

Abstract

In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned federal abortion protections established by Roe v. Wade (1973). Within hours, eleven states began enforcing total abortion bans, expanding to 13 by summer’s end. During the Dobbs proceedings, an amicus brief argued that abortion access had no meaningful effect on women’s economic participation. This dissertation challenges that claim through three studies examining how reproductive policies—specifically, policies governing access to abortion services and contraception—shape women’s labor market outcomes from the 1970s to the present. Chapter 2 reviews existing scholarship on abortion access, labor market outcomes, and intimate partner violence; the review demonstrates how these factors operate as interconnected barriers to U.S. women’s economic participation and identifies key data limitations and methodological concerns that subsequent chapters address. Chapter 3 applies modern difference-in-differences designs to study the effects of accessing abortion in late adolescence during the 1970s on women’s labor force participation and earnings. While recent research finds no significant labor market effects from contraceptive access during the same period, I find that teenage abortion access generated substantial long-run labor market returns for some women. Effects concentrate among white women, while Black women’s early gains are eroded by subsequent legal restrictions on abortion access that had a disproportional impact. Chapter 4 examines state-level abortion bans enacted fifty years later, after Dobbs overturned federal protections. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, I find that bans are associated with an increase childbearing, a reduction in educational attainment and work intensity, and lower high-skill occupation probability. Effects vary substantially across demographic groups and cannot be explained by interstate travel or out-migration. Together, these chapters provide new evidence that reproductive policies across U.S. states shape women’s economic trajectories across policy regimes and time periods.