Birth Control Prices Rise on Campus

I saw an article about this a year ago, and was wondering what had gone on. Changes in federal law has caused the price of birth control to rise at college campuses. Previously, the federal government had subsidized these products and therefore lowered the price students faced. Since these new changes, the article reports that certain contraceptives have seen significant declines in sales, which is support that demand for birth control is rational and responsive to price increases.

But, to say that women use less birth control in response to a rising price is not the same as saying that pregnancy or STD risk has increased. In Levine and Staiger's 2002 NBER Working Paper, "Abortion as Insurance", the authors model pregnancy risk as a function of abortion availability. The title references the moral hazard implications that abortion availability has on that risk - the cheaper the ex post protection against an unwanted pregnancy, the less the female precaution the female needs to invest in ex ante. That is, if you make bad outcomes less expensive, you are inadvertently reducing the price of the behavior that leads to the bad outcome. So, if we raise the price of birth control, there is some margin of female who will reduce her pregnancy risk in response by substituting to other birth controls (e.g., condoms), or decrease her pregnancy risk some other way (e.g., less intercourse per period). The impact of changing prices of birth control on pregnancy and STD outcomes are theoretically ambiguous, in other words.