Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Marijuana has the highest utilization rate among illicit drugs and is widespread among teenagers. About 35% of 12th graders have reported using the drug in 2015 (Johnston et al. 2017). In fact, not only cannabis consumption has increased significantly among teenagers; the non-riskiness belief about marijuana has also steadily been growing among teens (Johnston et al. 2017). Seemingly, teenage pregnancy outcomes such as live birth and abortion seem to be associated with the increase in marijuana utilization in recent years. A previous study by Weller and Halikas (1984) reports that the drug is associated with more frequent sexual intercourse and an increasing number of sexual partners insofar as 20% of the surveyed people have used it as a preparation for a beautiful sexual experience. More recently, Baggio et al. (2018) argue that not only marijuana users have relatively more sex and more partners; they also use relatively fewer condoms, thereby creating a higher likelihood of pregnancy.

In recent years, there has been a wave of regulations regarding marijuana for recreational purposes. Thirty-three (33) states have modified their institutional setting to welcome cannabis usage for medical purposes. Twenty-five (25) states, including the District of Columbia, have made a step further in the history of cannabis to enact laws to stop jailing residents for possession of a small amount of marijuana. In general, most of the states that have decriminalized the drug impose a civil fine. As far as marijuana for recreational purposes, following the legalization by Washington in 2012 and Colorado in 2014, nine (9) other states, including the District of Columbia, have decided to legalize the drug fully. Considering this large wave of marijuana regulations and given that marijuana is often consumed in relaxed circumstances that can lead to sexuality, in this paper, I intend to investigate the potential unintended effects of marijuana legislation on teenage pregnancy outcomes such as live birth and abortion.

I embrace a difference-in-differences (DD) framework where I exploit exogenous variations in medical, decriminalization, and recreational marijuana laws within state over time. Given my concerns about the DD model assumptions, my main specification is a triple difference (DDD) model that exploits variation from state, time, and the intensity of infertility arising from differential 2010 infertility-pregnancy ratio across states. This methodology is consistent with the work by Courtemanche et al. (2017) on Medicaid expansion.

My results suggest that states that have relatively higher infertility pregnancy ratio have relatively lower birth and reported legal abortion numbers. For example, being in a state that has an infertility ratio lower than the 2010 median infertility ratio, decriminalization of marijuana is predicted to increase birth by 3.42% compared to 0.85% in high infertility pregnancy ratio state. For recreational marijuana, the estimated effect on birth rate is 1.91% in low infertility ratio states and -6.31% in high infertility ratio states. When the impact of marijuana law on birth is positive, behavior outperforms biology as in Baggio et al. (2018). However, when the effect of the law is negative, biology trumps behavior.