Abstract: We investigate the impact of papal visits to Italian provinces on abortions from 1979 to 2012. Using administrative data, we find a 10–20% decrease in the number of abortions that commences in the 3rd month and persists until the 14th month after the visits. However, we find no significant change in the number of live births. A decline in unintended pregnancies best explains our results. Papal visits generate intense local media coverage, and likely make salient the Catholic Church’s stance against abortions. We show that papal visits lead to increased church attendance, and that the decline in abortions is greater when the Pope mentions abortion in his speeches.
Keywords: Abortion Religion Pope Culture Fertility
7 Discussion
To recap, we find a large and statistically significant decrease in abortions, ranging from − 10 to − 20%, that commences about 3 months after the papal visit and persists until the 14th month. We do not find any subsequent uptick in live births. The findings taken together suggest a strong indirect effect—papal visits induce a reduction in unintended pregnancies that starts around the time of the visits and persists for almost 1 year. In contrast, any direct effects of restriction in demand and/or supply of abortion appear to play limited role.
We have been agnostic whether the decrease in unintended pregnancies is being driven by increased abstinence or increased usage of contraceptives; we have bundled both behaviours as contraception. Despite extensive search, we were unable to locate extant Italian household survey data that would allow us to measure how papal visits affect the frequency of sexual intercourse or usage of contraceptives. But even if surveys were available, one would have to be careful in interpreting behavioural changes that would be the net effects of an increased desire for intended pregnancy among some women and also an increased aversion to unintended pregnancy among other women.21
In discussing the indirect effect, two other features of Church doctrine are relevant. First, the Church regards sexual intercourse as a sin if conducted outside sacramental marriage, or, even within wedlock, if deprived of its procreative function. Therefore, during and after papal visits, women might practise more abstinence unless they are planning on getting pregnant. Note that this is separate type of stigma that would independently drive down unintended pregnancies. Second, the Church explicitly discourages contraceptive usage because it breaks the connection between sex and reproduction within marriage and encourages recreational sex out of wedlock.22 For women seeking to minimise the risk of an unintended pregnancy, this poses a dilemma. One way out is to more abstinence. But some may opt for more usage of contraceptives as the “lesser of two evils”. Therefore, a mix of both behaviours—more abstinence and more contraceptive usage—may be driving the reduction in unintended pregnancies.
Thus far, we have assumed that all women have the chance to modify their behaviour in response to papal visits. But there is also a group of women who would have gotten pregnant before the papal visit became salient, and detected the (unintentional) pregnancy shortly before or after the visit. Faced with an increased cost of abortion, some women who would have chosen to abort might opt not to do so. We would then expect to see a contemporaneous drop in abortion, albeit smaller than the subsequent decline, and a spike in births 9 months later. But we find no such effects. It appears that, if already pregnant, papal visits do not change women’s abortion decisions. In other words, even the heightened cost of abortion is less than the cost of an unwanted birth. Looking back at the model in Section 4 (and Table 4), we can infer that among women who choose to abort, most are type II (always-aborters) and only a few are type III (switchers). Earlier, we had drawn the same inference from the lack of increase in births reported in Section 5.2. It is worth noting that the proportion of switchers is endogenous to the change in the cost of abortion; the greater the increase, the higher that proportion. The fact that switchers form only a small proportion suggests that the heightened stigma of abortion from papal visits is not sufficiently large to induce women to switch away from abortions, conditional on being pregnant.
Could our findings be driven by under-reporting?23 Stigma could drive women to switch to “back-street” abortion providers to keep the procedure secret. We cannot rule out under-reporting as a factor but it is unlikely to be the main explanation for our findings. With under-reporting, one would expect to see a drop in abortions contemporaneous with the papal visit.
How do our findings compare to those reported in the recent paper by Bassi and Rasul (2017) on the effect of the papal visit to Brazil in 1991? Their methodology is different from ours. For identification, they exploit the fortuitous timing of the 1991 DHS survey in Brazil which was fielded in the weeks before, during
and after the papal visit. They study how short-run beliefs and long-run behaviour of individuals respond to the papal persuasion. They report a substantial increase in the frequency of sexual intercourse, and a large reduction in the use of contraceptives among women interviewed post-visit. The net effect is a 26% increase in the frequency of unprotected sex that drives a positive fertility response with a spike in births 9 months post-visit. In contrast, in the Italian setting, we find no net effect on births. One plausible explanation for the difference is that a papal visit to Brazil is a much bigger event because it is so rare. This could have much larger effects on the perceived costs of abortion as well as on fertility preferences of Brazilian women.
As already noted, abortion ratios are highest among teenagers (see Table 2). We test how teen abortions respond to papal visits. The findings are reported in the Appendix A-Table 15. The effect on abortions is smaller for teenagers; there is a statistically significant decline of about 10% in the third quarter following the visit but no significant declines in other periods. We also test for the impact separately by age group, education level and marital status. The results are summarised in Appendix A, Figs. 9, 10 and 11. In general, the effects appear similar across groups except for a few differences. The decline appears to be larger for married women than for unmarried ones, and to a lesser degree, for less educated women versus higher educated ones. The finding of smaller effects for unmarried women is not surprising given what we find for teens, who likely make up a big part of the unmarried group. However, when we use pooled regressions to explicitly test whether the difference between married versus unmarried is statistically significant, we cannot reject the null of similar sized effects. The same is true for the difference by education level.
7.1 Is there a pattern to papal visits?
We ask whether papal visits are planned in response to underlying trends in abortions or religiosity. The concern is that if the Pope is more likely to visit provinces that are exhibiting a trend of relatively increasing religiosity (and concurrently a decreasing relative abortion rate), our estimate of the impact is not ‘causal’ but merely reflects this underlying trend.
First, we note that our identification strategy relies on the precise timing of the event, and in the preferred specifications, we control for province-specific quadratic time trends. Reassuringly, we find no discernible effect in the quarters (or months) preceding the event. Hence, we would argue that our estimates can be credibly inferred as causal.
Nevertheless, the time and place of a papal visit are unlikely to be random.24 The decision made by the Pope to visit a place could be driven by specific factors, e.g. motivated by the desire to reverse a general decline in religiosity among the local population that leads to an increasing abortion rate. If so, a papal visit may coincide with other (unobserved) ongoing activities by the Church in that province and during that time that could be driving our results.
We test whether the Pope is more likely to visit a province or region that exhibits an increase in the number of abortions or a decrease in the number of births or in the level of religiosity in the 1, 2 or 5 years preceding the papal event, using the following specification:
where Pope Eventp,y is a binary indicator taking the value 1 if province p was visited by the Pope in year y; %ΔiZp,y− 1 represents the percentage change in the number of abortions, births or in the average religiosity indicator, as defined in Section 6.3, over the 1, 2 or 5 years preceding the visit of the Pope in province p, γp × t and δp × t2 are provincial yearly trends; 𝜃p and 𝜃y are province and year fixed effects.25
(3)
Table 10 displays the results from estimating Eq. 3. Starting from panel A, the papal visits do not respond to any pre-trend in the number of abortions registered in the 1, 2 or 5 years preceding the visit to a specific province. We repeat the same exercise to test whether the papal visits are influenced by changes in births (panel B) or religiosity (panel C). Also, in these cases, no statistically significant effect is detected. Overall, the results bolster confidence that our main findings are causal effects of papal visits and not merely picking up underlying trends in local religiosity and Church activities.
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