CONTRACEPTION ACCESS AND THE FEMALE VOTE: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AMERICAN WOMEN, THEIR BIRTH CONTROL, AND THEIR VOTE

Abstract

In recent years, the intersection of politics and reproductive health has become an issue fraught with controversy. However, even with this national focus on reproductive health, the research on the topic has been largely one-sided. The vast majority of literature on the subject looks at how politics impact access to reproductive care. While this is undoubtedly an important issue, I am interested in the reverse situation: how access to reproductive care impacts politics. Specifically for the case of this thesis, I hypothesize that increased access to contraception leads to increased voter turnout for American women. To do so, I first link contraceptive access to other variables that correlate with increased voting rates such as educational attainment. Then I isolate three key variables to represent the level of access to contraception. 1) The amount of contraception legally required to be covered by insurance, 2) The amount of women living in a county without a healthcare center, and 3) The amount of women living in a “contraceptive desert.” By graphing these variables relative to state female voting rates, I discovered that, while consequences of contraceptive access like workforce participation and education do lead to higher rates of female voting, contraceptive access itself does not.