Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

When the child welfare system removes children from their homes and places them in foster care it has profound effects on children and parents, and imposes direct financial costs on taxpayers. Foster care is a large and expensive program, with 437,000 children in foster care in 2016 and an average cost of $19,000 per child per year. Children in foster care have persistently worse outcomes in adulthood, with lower rates of employment and education. While there is debate regarding the causal roles of foster care placement versus related family and environmental factors, reducing the risk of foster care is of high policy interest.

Abortion policy is also a hot topic, as interest groups have consistently fought to reduce abortions through legislation. Since abortion was legalized nationwide, states have enacted restrictions on almost all parts of the process. Many clinics have closed and the procedure has become financially out of reach for many people.

While there is little evidence from the literature on the implications of abortion policy for child abuse, there has been significant work on the relationship between abortion policy and crime, as well as on the determinants of foster care caseloads. The existing literature finds that the legalization of abortion is associated with a reduction in rates of reported child abuse and neglect, but finds no persistent significant relationship between post-legalization restrictions and maltreatment reports (Bitler and Zavodny 2002, 2004).

In theory, the relationship between abortion restrictions and child maltreatment could be positive or negative. On the positive side, it may be that as restrictions increase, people who are pregnant but do not have the desire or resources to parent may be forced to become parents, increasing the number of children with parents unable or unwilling to parent in a safe way. This in turn will lead to more reports of abuse and neglect, increasing the number of children in foster care. Alternatively, the increased restrictions may encourage people to be more careful and avoid risky sexual behaviors that may result in pregnancy, decreasing the number of unintended pregnancies.

This paper attempts to estimate the relationship between abortion access and maltreatment using data on county foster care caseloads, a proxy for child maltreatment. For robustness, I use two sources of county-level data, each with limitations and advantages. I analyze both the National KidsCount data and the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect foster care files. Additional data on abortion policies and abortion clinic locations over time, and other county characteristics, come from sources including the Guttmacher Institute, InfoGroup, and the Census.

Using panel data methods, preliminary analyses find a strong positive relationship between lagged state abortion policy restrictions and county foster care rates, controlling for the generic time trend in caseloads. The effect appears to be concentrated among policies that increase the costs of service, such as policies restricting public funding for abortion services. The poster will discuss the policy implications, both for foster care and for family planning.