RESEARCH

TRAP'd Teens: Impacts of abortion provider regulations on fertility & education (with Kelly M. Jones). IZA Discussion Paper No. 14837. Under review

Targeted regulations of abortion providers (TRAP laws) are the fastest-growing abortion restriction in the U.S. These often result in clinic closures, limiting abortion access. We study how women's exposure to these laws in adolescence affects their fertility and educational attainment. We first codify the legal history of all TRAP laws ever implemented. We then explore the impacts of TRAP laws on teen births using an event-study analysis and stacked difference-in-differences methodology to avoid issues of negative weighting inherent in two-way fixed effects approaches. Our findings indicate that teen births in states that implemented TRAP laws increased by more than 3 percent relative to changes in states without these restrictions. We offer evidence that these impacts are driven by reductions in abortion access and abortion use. We further document that adolescent exposure to TRAP laws has downstream impacts on education. We find that Black women first exposed to TRAP laws before age 18 are 2.1 percent less likely to initiate college and 5.8 percent less likely to complete college. For White women, impacts are on college completion only, are less than half as large, and are not robust.