Kelly Ragan
17 Apr 2025
The Trump administration has frozen federal funding for contraceptive services at a time when abortion rights have already been rolled back across much of the US. This column suggests that economists and policymakers aiming to predict the consequences of these policies look to Sweden, where oral contraception (‘the pill’) was introduced 60 years ago, when a national abortion ban was still in place. The Swedish data suggest that for teens who face the greatest risk of pregnancy, small differences in access costs can have large consequences for childbearing rates.
Reproductive rights have been curtailed in the US in recent years. The latest restriction is the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding for subsidised access to contraceptive services for millions of Americans (The Guardian 2025). Economists and policymakers who want to predict the consequences of this abrupt policy reversal should look to Sweden. My analysis of Swedish data – which indicates that small changes in the sales of contraceptives, when driven by access costs, can have large consequences for teen childbearing (Ragan 2025) – suggests the Trump administration’s restrictions on contraceptive services will be borne by American teenagers, who will become parents earlier than if they’d had access to contraception.
Continued: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/contraceptive-access-and-teen-childbearing-lessons-sweden