Family Planning, Fertility and Abortion: Evidence from a Historical Policy Experiment

A large literature considers family planning programs with a focus on birth control and finds that access reduces fertility. In this paper, I study the fertility effects of access to a Danish family planning program introduced in 1939 and designed as a political response to decades of declining fertility and widespread use of illegal abortions. I exploit variation in the timing of program implementation and use digitised data for Danish towns and counties from 1921 to 1947 to estimate the causal fertility effects using the synthetic control method. I find significant and positive non-marital fertility effects of program access but no effects on marital fertility. Suggestive evidence indicates that mothers, who in the absence of the program would have aborted illegally, now give birth and either adopt away or raise the child outside of marriage.