Sex-selective abortion bans in the United States: evidence from laws passed 2010-2019

This paper attempts to estimate the effect of sex-selective abortion bans passed in the United States between 2010 and 2019 on the sex-ratio at birth among Asians and other Pacific Islanders. We use both difference-in-differences (DiD) across state and year and difference-in-difference-in-differences (DiDiD) across state, year, and child parity to identify this effect. While we find reason to expect that our DiD estimates will overstate the effect of a sex-selective abortion ban, our DiDiD estimates are robust to this. None of our estimates find statistically significant effects of sex-selective abortion bans, and the point estimates from our DiDiD estimates imply these bans leave the sex-ratio at birth among 3rd and higher parity children slightly elevated, changing from 108.1 boys to every 100 girls to 107.3 boys to every 100 girls.