Provider availability, race, and abortion demand

Variations in the availability of abortion providers may impact the demand for abortions since greater provider availability reduces the travel cost a ssociated with obtaining an abortion. This paper applies a fertility-contro l model to estimate the responsiveness of abortion demand to travel-cost va riations using individual data from all births and abortions of women over age 20 in the state of Texas for 1993. The probability that a pregnant woma n chooses an abortion appears to be sensitive to availability-induced varia tions in the travel cost of abortion services. Controlling for the endogene ity of travel distance, the results suggest that pregnant women who reside in counties with longer travel distances to the nearest abortion provider h ave lower probabilities of aborting their pregnancies than women in countie s closer to abortion providers. Simulations show that changes in travel dis tance will have relatively large impacts on overall abortion rates and, fur thermore, that these effects vary across race. In addition, these simulatio ns show substantial differences by race in the effects of changes in other explanatory variables.