Thursday, October 22, 2020

Morbid Safetyism

 From First Things:

These thoughts were recalled to me this week by a new study put out by research faculty at MIT and Boston College respectively, Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon. Published on SSRN as a working paper, “Car Seats as Contraception” examines state and year variation in car seat laws. Since 1977, these laws have increasingly raised the age until which a young child must ride in a car seat (to as high as age 8 in some states). The authors note, as anyone with a third child can attest, that “these laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back.” They go on to pull state and year census data on household births, and find that women with two children below the car seat age in any given year are approximately three-quarters of a percentage point less likely to have a third child in that year than women with two children who are not constrained by the regulation (e.g., with at least one child above the car seat age). Since the probability of a woman with two kids giving birth to a third child in any given year is already very low (about 9 percent), a nearly one-point reduction in third births is significant.

For the year 2017, the authors estimate a permanent reduction of 8,000 births. Over their entire sample period, beginning in 1980, Nickerson and Solomon estimate about 145,000 prevented births, with 90 percent of the prevented births occurring since the year 2000 as car seat regulations became more aggressive. They point out that merely rolling back the car seat age (to age 4), rather than repealing the laws altogether, would have a significant positive impact on births, and they present simulations to this effect. (Read more.)
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