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Brown Bag Seminar | The Effect of COVID-19 Restrictions on Abortion Clinic Visits with David Slusky

Welcome to the Brown Bag Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is David Slusky, University of Kansas. David presents "The Effect of COVID-19 Restrictions on Abortion Clinic Visits". Due to COVID-19, 33 states in the USA banned elective medical procedures, and 13 of these states included surgical abortions.

David Slusky is De-Min and Chin-Sha Wu Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Kansas, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at IZA - Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany.

David is an applied microeconomist. His research focuses on health economics, labor economics, and public policy.

David will present "The Effect of COVID-19 Restrictions on Abortion Clinic Visits" (joint with Martin Andersen and Sylvia Bryan).

Abstract

Due to COVID-19, 33 states banned elective medical procedures, and 13 of these states included surgical abortions. We collected street addresses of abortion clinics and linked them to SafeGraph’s data on visitor counts. We found at least a 16 percent decrease in clinic visits in February-May 2020 versus 2019. States that banned elective procedures or imposed other measures (i.e., stay-at-home orders) saw a substantial additional decrease. However, there was no significant additional decrease from explicit surgical abortions bans. We estimate that the decrease in foot traffic over these four months reduced abortions by 6 percent in 2020 relative to 2019.

This seminar we be held online via Zoom.

Please contact kristen.pendleton@hhs.se if you wish to attend or have other questions.

Dept. of Economics Economics Lunch seminar Brown bag