It wasn't a stretch to predict that the strict abortion bans in states such as Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas would have demographic effects — driving residents out of those states and reducing migration from abortion-protective states.

New research has validated that prediction and put meat on its bones. Most notably, economists at Georgia Tech reported in a paper published this month that by mid-2023, the 13 states with total bans had suffered a combined net loss of an estimated 36,000 residents per quarter, or more than 144,000 per year.

Over two years, that amounts to a net loss of more than one-third of a percent of the combined population of about 80 million in the 13 states with abortion bans.

Over time, the trend could result in a population 1% lower than it would have been if the abortion bans weren't in place. That should be enough to catch the attention of lawmakers in those states because of its potential to negate programs aimed at luring workers and families.

"It should concern them in terms of the population that will be available to work in their states over time," Georgia Tech economist Daniel L. Dench, a co-author of the paper, told me.

The magnitude of the population loss, the paper estimated, is equivalent to the outflow that would be caused by a 10% increase in local crime rates.

The effect was more pronounced among single-person households than families, the researchers found.

That suggests "an outsized influence of reproductive rights on younger, more mobile populations," they wrote — possibly because the logistics of moving a family are more burdensome than for single persons, and also that single people may be more likely to be women of childbearing age.

"State abortion policies alter the relative attractiveness of locations and the geographic distribution of human capital," the paper concludes.

The new study contributes valuable grist for the continuing debate over the social and economic impacts of abortion restrictions.

A few months after the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned the guarantee of abortion rights, the conservative legal scholar Ilya Somin of George Mason University conjectured that any brain drain would be "relatively small." He based his guess on the fact that abortions were concentrated among low-income women.

"Most highly educated women are unlikely to ever get an abortion," he wrote, "and many of those who might need one can potentially avail themselves of various substitutes for getting one in-state."

This was a blinkered view of reproductive healthcare rights, however. It has since become evident that strict antiabortion laws don't only affect women seeking elective abortions, but those experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies who are denied the full panoply of medical treatments, turning even routine complications into life-threatening conditions.

In Texas, which imposed its abortion ban in September 2021, even before the Dobbs ruling, the maternal death rate rose to 28.5 per 100,000 live births in 2022, well above the national average of 22.3. The rate rose by 56% from 2019 through 2022.

The Georgia Tech findings resemble those of more specialized surveys tracking the effect of abortion bans and restrictions imposed by many states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.

For example, applications from medical students for residency positions in obstetrics and gynecology in abortion-banning states fell 11.7% in 2023 from the previous year, and by another 6.7% in 2024, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges.

The reasons aren't hard to fathom. For one thing, OB/GYN residency programs can't be accredited unless they provide clinical experience in abortion care. That might be impossible in abortion-ban states, though programs can arrange for that training to be delivered in other states.

Living and working in a state where routine medical treatments might expose them to criminal prosecution, stiff prison terms, fines, the loss of medical licenses and lawsuits, moreover, can't be appealing to physicians considering where to apply for training and open their practices.

In emergency medicine — a specialty in which doctors may have to make split-second decisions on treating pregnant women with urgent conditions — the drop was even greater, down 23.7% in 2023 and a further 7.1% in 2024. Fall-offs were seen in residency applications in other specialties that might be affected by abortion bans, such as pediatrics and family medicine.

Business owners also have complained that abortion bans raise their costs, because they have to offer better healthcare benefits to recruits to counteract the reduction in reproductive health benefits and have to commit themselves to paying for out-of-state travel for affected workers and their family members.

A coalition of 39 Texas businesses made that point in a friend-of-the-court brief to the Texas Supreme Court in 2023, while the court pondered the state's abortion ban. (The court upheld the ban.)

The ban and related restrictions on medical care were not only increasing businesses' costs but "driving away top talent, risking potential future business coming to the State, and threatening a diverse workforce," the plaintiffs stated. "This is not hyperbole."

The plaintiffs cited numerous anecdotes of professional workers who moved to jobs out of state, refused relocations to Texas, or declined job offers.

"These stories are not anomalies," the brief warned, citing a survey finding that one-third of job-seekers will apply for positions only in states with unrestricted access to reproductive healthcare and that more than a fourth of workers already living in restrictive states will apply for jobs only in states where abortion is currently legal and likely to remain so.

It's true that factors other than the availability of healthcare influence decisions on where to live and work — taxes, weather and climate and the cost of living, among other things.

California's salubrious climate, vigorous, entrepreneurial economy and guarantee of reproductive healthcare rights didn't avert a population decline earlier in this decade.

Because the population of other states grew faster than California's prior to the 2020 census, California lost a House seat for the first time in its history. Its House delegation of 52 remains nearly half-again as large as that of second-place Texas, with 38. In any event, California's population grew strongly in the two years ended June 30, 2024, thanks in part to higher legal immigration, increased inflows from other states and reduced outflows, and an increase in net natural gains (births minus deaths).

The Georgia Tech economists neutralized non-abortion-related influences by comparing the 13 states with abortion bans to a sample of 25 states that are similar except for the lack of a ban (the researchers labeled these "abortion-protecting states"). They used postal service change-of-address records to track population outflows; the records were only available through the second quarter of 2023, limiting their ability to extend their study beyond that point.

They found that net population outflows increased sharply after the Dobbs ruling in states that immediately imposed abortion bans, and have largely continued to increase over time especially in single-person households.

The abortion-banning states examined in the study are Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The Wisconsin ban was overturned in state court in September 2023 and the Missouri ban was blocked in late 2024.

The researchers didn't produce hard data on population changes in 13 states that have restricted, but not banned, abortions, typically by banning abortions after a certain gestational age. The researchers labeled these "hostile states," and found no reason to believe that they wouldn't also experience population losses.

"The effect in hostile states looks like it's in the same direction and of a similar magnitude," Dench says.

The implications for state policymakers should be plain — if they don't allow antiabortion ideology to outweigh social and economic realities. Among other factors, well-educated and socially aware people are likely to be more attentive to reproductive healthcare rights.

"Who is being deterred from living in states with restricted abortion access?" the authors ask. "The fact that highly educated individuals tend to be more mobile and more supportive of abortion access," they write, has "important implications for state economies."

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