People are leaving red states over abortion bans, studies find
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
New evidence confirms that people started fleeing red states after the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights in its 2022 Dobbs ruling.
Why it matters: At first, there were mainly anecdotes about individuals who were considering moving out of states with strict abortion bans.
- This year, the harder data started rolling in.
The big picture: Employers say bans make it more difficult to recruit talent.
- The departures are also a hit to a state's economy. The ones leaving are valuable citizens, often high-earning young adults — sometimes in key public health roles — at the start of their professional lives. Typically, these are the people who are planning families.
- "It's a classic case of brain drain," says Julia Taylor Kennedy, senior director at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Zoom in: "People are making migration decisions" based on these bans, says Jason Lindo, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who just published a widely read study on the topic.
- Lindo and his coauthors found states with total abortion bans collectively lost about 128,700 residents in the first year following the Dobbs decision.
- If these trends continue over a five-year period, it would mean a nearly 1% population loss for ban states compared to those with protections around reproductive healthcare, he tells Axios.
How they did it: The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, uses gold standard difference-in-differences methodology, where a control group is compared to a "treatment" population.
- In this case, they compared U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data in ban states to those with reproductive rights protection before and after Dobbs.
The study doesn't include any information about who these movers are.
- We do know some movers are OB-GYN doctors, high-income professionals who are critical to a state's infrastructure.
- A study published online by JAMA this week, also using difference-in-differences methods, found a significant number have left ban states.
Meanwhile: One in five adults planning to have children in the next decade said they either have moved out of a red state, or know someone who has, because of abortion restrictions, per a recent survey conducted by Morning Consult and the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR).
- "If you're like, I'm trying to get pregnant, if I have a complication, I don't want to fall into some gray area about whether I'm going to be able to get life saving care," says Kennedy at the CRR. "I'm going to move to a place where I know I can get it."
Zoom in: "It was a big decision," says Amanda Ducach, the CEO of a women's health AI company who moved her family — and her firm's headquarters — to Boston from Houston.
- Ducach was pregnant with her second child when Dobbs was decided, and living in Texas, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, caused some stress. She was also worried about running a women's health company in a state that restricts access to care.
- "It's not a political statement," she says. It's a matter of mitigating risk. She notes that moving out of a low-tax state like Texas was also a costly move.
The bottom line: Data showing that people are actually picking up and leaving because of these bans is particularly striking, given how difficult moving can be.
