Access to healthcare, fertility, and reproductive health

• Department of Economics

Judit Vall Castellò, UB and IEB, will present her paper "Access to healthcare, fertility, and reproductive health "

We examine the impact of excluding unauthorized immigrants from public healthcare on fertility behaviors and birth-related outcomes by exploiting a reform in Spain in 2012. Using comprehensive administrative data on the universe of births and abortions, we implement a synthetic difference-in-differences design to compare outcomes across nationalities differentially affected by the 2012 reform. We find a fall in abortion rates and an increase in birth rates among women from countries with higher shares of unauthorized immigrants following the policy change, suggesting restricted access to reproductive healthcare. We also show that births from immigrant women affected by the reform were more likely to involve complications, worsening maternal health, in part due to changes in the composition of mothers. Our findings underscore the unintended consequences of policies that restrict access to healthcare and their effects on prenatal care usage, contraceptive access, and long-term maternal and child health.

Co-authors: Libertad Gonzalez and Maddalena Grignani