The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Child Health Outcomes and Abandonment. Evidence from Romania

Andreea Mitrut and François-Charles Wolff

No 512, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

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 childrens 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2011-08-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/26523 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of legalized abortion on child health outcomes and abandonment. Evidence from Romania (2011)
Working Paper: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Child Health Outcomes and Abandonment. Evidence from Romania (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0512

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().