Study: Income, access to family planning tied together
By Daniel Lippman, Wall Street Journal
Increased access to family planning programs is linked to higher incomes and better college completion later in life, according to new research.
“Cheaper and more reliable contraception reduces the immediate and expected costs of delaying childbearing, freeing up resources in the parents’ human capital,” according to the new working paper by University of Michigan economist Martha Bailey. Such a delay allows “soon-to-be parents to get more education, work experience, and job training, and thus increase their lifetime earnings.”
Before the Supreme Court’s 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, a number of states had banned the sale of contraception. The paper, which primarily used data from the 2000 Census and the 2005-2011 American Community Survey, found that children conceived in areas that had higher legal or financial access to the birth-control pill were associated with a 2-3 percent increase in income when they were adults. Children in these areas also had a 2-7 percent higher chance of finishing college.