The Supply of Birth Control Methods Education and Fertility Evidence from Romania Cristian Pop Eleches Columbia University This Draft January 2004 Abstract This paper investigates the e ect of the supply of birth control methods on fertility behavior by exploring the e ects of Romania s 23 year period of continued pronatalist policies Between 1957 and 1966 Romania had a very liberal abortion policy and abortion was the main method of birth control In 1966 the Romanian government abruptly decided to make both abortion and family planning illegal This policy was sustained until December 1989 with only minor modifications The implementation and repeal of the restrictive regime provide a useful and plausibly exogenous source of variation in the cost of birth control methods that is arguably orthogonal to the demand for children The main empirical strategy is to study reproductive outcomes of women just before and after the policy shift in December 1989 in Romania and to compare those outcomes with similar outcomes of women in Moldova a country where abortion and modern contraceptives were legally available both before and during the economic transition that started in 1990 Women who spent most of their reproductive years under the restrictive regime experienced large increases in fertility about 0 5 children or a 25 increase Less educated women had bigger increases in fertility after policy implementation and larger fertility decreases following the lifting of restrictions in 1989 when fertility di erentials between educational groups decreased by almost fifty percent These findings strongly suggest that access to abortion and birth control are quantitatively significant determinants of fertility levels particularly for less educated women I am especially grateful to my dissertation advisors Michael Kremer Larry Katz Caroline Hoxby and Andrei Shleifer for their guidance and support I also thank Abhijit Banerjee David Cutler Esther Duflo Ed Glaeser Claudia Goldin Robin Greenwood Seema Jayachandran Sarah Reber Ben Olken Mark Rosenzweig Emmanuel Saez Tara Watson and seminar participants at Harvard Columbia and NEUDC for useful comments Any errors are solely mine Financial support from the Social Science Research Council Program in Applied Economics the MacArthur Foundation the Center for Population Studies and the Davis Center at Harvard University is gratefully acknowledged cp2124 columbia edu 1 1 Introduction What are the roles of demand side factors demand for children and supply side factors access to abortion and modern contraceptive methods in the demographic transition associated with modern economic growth and development Which factors explain the striking empirical regularity that less educated women have greater fertility The answer to the first question is of obvious policy interest because it is directly related to the debate on whether family planning programs have an e ect on fertility The debate tends to be polarized between those who believe that good family planning programs can work everywhere and those who contend that programs have little e ect Freedman and Freedman 1992 It has proven di cult to convincingly isolate the e ects of family planning programs unambiguously from other possible factors that reduce fertility Understanding the di erential impact of access to birth control methods across education groups also helps us identify the sources of fertility di erences by education Although the negative association between female education and fertility is a robust correlation that has been established in many countries at di erent points in time it is less clear what mechanism underlies this relationship This negative association is consistent with two broad explanations which are not mutually exclusive 1 more educated and less educated women have a di erent demand for children and 2 more educated and less educated women are di erentially e ective in using birth control 1 technologies to control fertility The link between education and fertility explained by demand factors can arise from a number of channels 1 the price of time e ect from the household model Becker 1981 2 a taste e ect of education for fewer better educated children or 3 an increase in age at marriage because women who go to school marry later The interaction of education and the supply of birth control methods resulting in lower fertility can also be explained by a number of factors 1 educated women have greater access to contraception 2 they could face lower psychic costs of using a particular contraceptive method or 3 they are potentially more e cient at using a particular contraceptive method This paper uses Romania s distinctive history of changes in access to birth control methods as a natural experiment to isolate and measure supply side e ects and to test if they help explain di erences in fertility by education Between 1957 and 1966 Romania had a very liberal abortion policy and abortion was the main method of contraception In 1966 the Romanian government abruptly made abortion and family planning illegal This policy was sustained with only minor modifications until December 1989 when following the fall of communism Romania reverted back to a liberal policy regarding abortion and modern contraceptives The basic empirical strategy is to study reproductive outcomes of women just before and after the policy shift legalizing abortion in December 1989 in Romania and to 2 compare those outcomes with outcomes of similar women in Moldova Moldova is an appropriate comparison country since the majority of the population in Moldova is ethnically Romanian Furthermore abortion and modern contraceptives were legally available in Moldova both before and during the economic transition that started in 1990 I will also examine longer term patterns of fertility levels across policy regimes looking at cohorts of Romanian and Hungarian women in Romania compared to similar cohorts from Hungary My analysis shows that the supply of birth control methods has a large e ect on fertility levels and explains a large part of the fertility di erentials across educational groups Results from Romania s 23 year period of continued pronatalist policies suggest large increases in fertility for women who spent most of their reproductive years under the restrictive regime about 0 5 children or a 25 increase The data shows bigger increases in fertility for less educated women after abortion was banned in the 1960 s and larger