The pharmacist will see you now: Pharmacist prescribed contraceptives and fertility rates

Daniel Grossman, Arijit Ray and Allyssa Wadsworth

Journal of Health Economics, 2025, vol. 100, issue C

Abstract: Policies that increase contraceptive access for young women and their partners are a potentially low-cost way of reducing unintended pregnancies and improving later life outcomes. Several states have recently implemented laws that allow pharmacists to prescribe contraceptives to women without the need to see a physician. We study the effect of these state laws on fertility rates. Using US Natality files for 2014–2020, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy using the 13 states that had enacted a law until the first quarter of 2020 as the treated group, and the 15 policy-implementing states post-2020 quarter 1 as the control group. We find approximately 0.5 fewer births per 1000 women aged 15–49 per quarter occur post law implementation, compared to control states. The effect of the policy appears to be focused among women aged 25–34 and 40–44 and women with a high school education or less.

Keywords: Fertility rates; Contraceptives; Pharmacist-prescribed; Family planning; The pill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629624000870
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:100:y:2025:i:c:s0167629624000870

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2024.102942

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().