State abortion policy, geographic access to abortion providers and changing family formation.

Context: One of the goals in cutting welfare payments and setting time limits on welfare receipt is the reduction of out-of-wedlock childbearing among poor women. Yet such changes may increase the demand for abortion at the same time that access to abortion has decreased, throwing into doubt the potential effect of these changes on the proportion of women who are heading families.

Methods: State and county fixed-effects models were used to estimate the effects of factors influencing abortion availability-geographic access, parental notification requirements and Medicaid funding restrictions-on the county-level proportion of women heading households.

Results: The decline in geographic access to abortion providers during the 1980s accounted for a small but significant portion of the rise in the percentage of women heading families (about 2%). Restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion accounted for about half of the increase in female headship among blacks, while new state parental notification requirements contributed modestly to the rise in the proportion of white women heading single-parent families.

Conclusions: Welfare reform legislation and attempts to reduce the availability of abortion services in the United States appear to be working at cross-purposes. Cutbacks in access to abortion may have contributed modestly to the increase in the proportion of women heading households.

Current government policies seemingly reflect mixed if not contradictory goals for the American family. The newly implemented Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is aimed at strengthening the traditional two-parent family while discouraging out-of-wedlock childbearing. New time limits on welfare receipt and mandated work requirements have imposed additional "costs" on unmarried childbearing.

An explicit aim of the legislation is to promote economic self-sufficiency among welfare-dependent single mothers, while also reducing the share of children in poverty. Some policymakers believe that the knowledge that welfare is less generous than in the past may motivate sexually active unmarried women to become better contraceptive users and encourage pregnant single women to marry their partners.

Time-limited welfare, mandated work requirements and the imposition of family caps on benefits (in some states) may also have the unintended effect of increasing the demand for abortion services among low-income women with unplanned pregnancies.(1) At the same time, many states are passing laws aimed at restricting geographic and legal access to reproductive health and abortion services. Recent Supreme Court decisions now allow states to require abortion providers to notify parents of abortions performed on minors, to impose restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion and to create 24-hour waiting periods. An unintended effect of such restrictions may be an accelerated growth in nonmarital births that, in turn, increases the proportion of unmarried women heading families.