tailieunhanh - The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Child Health Outcomes and Abandonment.

We analyze data from the 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS1), distinct in its collection of a broad array of current and retrospective socio-economic and health information among individuals, households, and communities2 . The selection of households is representative of 83% of the Indonesian population, thus capturing the cultural and economic diversity among Indonesia’s regional populations. An important part of the accompanying facility survey was a series of written clinical case scenarios, enabling an assessment of the quality of provider care processes that controls for variation in illness severity for comparison across facilities. . | UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ECONOMICS AND LAW WORKING PAPERS IN ECONOMICS No 512 The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Child Health Outcomes and Abandonment. Evidence from Romania by Andreea Mitrut and Francois-Charles Wolff August 2011 ISSN 1403-2473 print ISSN 1403-2465 online Department of Economics School of Business Economics and Law at University of Gothenburg Vasagatan 1 PO Box 640 SE 405 30 Goteborg Sweden 46 31 786 0000 46 31 786 1326 fax info@ The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Child Health Outcomes and Abandonment. Evidence from Romania Andreea MitruC and Pranẹois-Charles Wolff J Abstract We use household survey data and a unique census of institutionalized children to analyze the impact of abortion legalization in Romania. We exploit the lift of the abortion ban in December 1989 when communist dictator Ceausescu and his regime were removed from power to understand its impact on children s health at birth and during early childhood and whether the lift of the ban had an immediate impact on child abandonment. We find insignificant estimates for health at birth outcomes and anthropometric z-scores at age 4 and 5 except for the probability of low birth weight which is slightly higher for children born after abortion became legal. Additionally our findings suggest that the lift of the ban had decreased the number of abandoned children. Keywords abortion health anthropometric outcomes child abandonment Romania JEL classification I12 J13 We are indebted to our editor and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful remarks and suggestions on a previous draft. We have also benefited from input from Lennart Flood and Olof Johansson-Stenman and from seminar participants at Uppsala University Orebro University INED Angers Journee de Microéconomie Appliquée and University of Reims Workshop Response . We are indebted to the Romanian National Institute of Statistics and the World Bank for making the data available. The