From Prohibition to Choice: The Impact of Abortion Legalization on Fertility and Child Investments in Nepal

In societies with son-preference, the transition from high fertility to low fertility is often accompanied by a skewed sex ratio at birth. How expanding reproductive autonomy in such societies changes fertility and early-life investments in children remains unclear. We study this question in the context of Nepal by evaluating the impact of the 2002 abortion legalization. Using a triple-difference design comparing girls and boys across firstborn-sex families before and after the reform, we find that the abortion legalization substantially reduced son-biased fertility stopping: the gap in the number of children between firstborn-girl and firstborn-boy families fell by nearly three-fifths, while the probability that a girl is missing due to sex-selective abortion rose by 1.8 percentage points. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that roughly 1 in 75 girls is missing from post-reform birth cohorts. On investments, daughters in firstborn-girl families gained about two months of breastfeeding, closing most of the pre-existing deficit. Taken together, the policy response to abortion legalization in a son-preferring society indicates a quantity-quality trade-off: lower cost of achieving desired family size and sex mix can lead to intensified prenatal selection against girls and increased early-life investments in those who are born.