Do State Abortion Bans Impact People’s Location Decisions?

The Issue:

Although the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision was preceded by many state restrictions on abortion, the ruling fundamentally altered abortion access across the United States. Abortions were instantly halted in some states while other states enacted or expanded protections to abortion access over the ensuing months. Some business leaders have argued that abortion restrictions make it difficult to recruit and retain workers, with some employers now covering out-of-state travel for abortion services. Survey data suggests these concerns may be warranted: 62 percent of a representative sample of Americans aged 18-34 reported they would "definitely not" or "probably not" live in a state that banned abortion in a 2024 survey. The question is whether people are actually acting on these stated preferences by moving away from states with abortion restrictions after the Dobbs decision. New research provides the first evidence that the introduction of abortion bans has had a significant impact on domestic moving trends, which could have implications for regional labor markets and economic growth.

Immediately after Dobbs, outmigration from abortion ban states saw increases over and above what comparable abortion-protecting states experienced.

The Facts:

• The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, released on June 24, 2022, allowed states to enforce pre-viability abortion bans. Bans took effect immediately or shortly after the ruling in 13 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. We compare population outflows from these states with those of a set of 24 states and the District of Columbia that have specific laws or constitutional protections in place for abortion or allow it up to a point of pre-Dobbs state-defined viability. The states in this second group did not have active legislative efforts to ban abortion during our study and some — including California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, among others — took steps to expand abortion rights after Dobbs (see full list on page 4). 
• Change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service measure migration monthly, making it possible to analyze whether there are immediate migration effects from the Dobbs ruling and how effects evolve over time. Net change-of-address outflows are obtained by subtracting changes of address into each state from changes of address out. Because the data only record moves when people file a change-of-address form, they don’t capture international immigration into the U.S. Net outflow rates are consistently positive for both sets of states, likely reflecting the fact that change-of-address data captures emigration from the United States but not immigration to the United States. 
• Before the Dobbs decision, net population outflow rates were consistently higher for states in the abortion-protecting group than for states that would go on to ban abortion after Dobbs. This difference grew rapidly at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is consistent with research on migration patterns during the pandemic that finds that migration increased between 2019 and 2020 and favored migration away from the Pacific and mid-Atlantic states to the US South. Starting in the first quarter of 2021, the gap between the two groups began to narrow as outflows from ban states increased. Following the Dobbs decision, net outflows from states with abortion bans continued to increase, appearing to accelerate relative to trends from the preceding three quarters. In contrast, net outflows from states with abortion protections remained relatively stable. By the most recent quarter for which data are available (the second quarter of 2023), a trend reversal had occurred: net outflows from ban states exceeded those from states maintaining or protecting abortion access. This pattern in change-of-address data is consistent with findings from a recent report using census population estimates that finds that between mid-2022 and mid-2024 domestic migration to the South decreased.
• How much of a role did abortion bans play in the shift in migration trends? States with bans and those that maintain or protect abortion access differ in many other ways that can influence migration trends beyond their abortion policies. To isolate the causal effect of abortion bans on outmigration, we analyze how migration outcomes change over time (post-Dobbs versus pre-Dobbs) for each ban state and compare these trends with a set of states (among those protecting or maintaining abortion access) that has been refined to give the greatest weight to those that are the best comparators based on their migration histories. In so doing, our statistical strategy captures the effects of bans on the states implementing them, over and above what is expected based on their histories. We find that the difference in population outflow rates in ban states and the weighted set of control states does not systematically deviate from zero prior to Dobbs. This suggests that the differences in population outflows between the two groups remain stable in the years leading up to Dobbs. However, this changes immediately following the Dobbs decision: there is a statistically significant increase in outmigration from abortion ban states over and above what abortion-protecting comparison states experience (see chart). 
• Total abortion bans are causing significant population outflows according to our estimates. In the year following implementation of a total abortion ban, states are losing on net about 4.3 people per 10,000 residents due to the ban. This implies that abortion bans resulted in a loss of about 128,700 residents across the 13 states with such laws in the year following the Dobbs decision. The migration effects appear to have grown stronger over time. The most recent data from the second quarter of 2023 indicates that the 13 states that implemented total abortion bans immediately after Dobbs are collectively losing about 36,000 residents per quarter due to these bans. If such an effect is sustained over a five-year period, it would imply a 0.98% population loss for states banning abortion as opposed to protecting or maintaining abortion access. Even states with restrictions short of total bans are seeing some population losses post-Dobbs. We find that states that were hostile to abortion access in ways other than implementing total bans — for instance those that enacted 6-week gestational age bans after Dobbs, such as Georgia, Ohio, Florida, Iowa and South Carolina— also experienced increased out-migration as a result of their policies following the Dobbs decision, though these effects are not always statistically significant.
• Separate analyses of individuals filing change-of-address requests for themselves versus for families indicates that single-person households are more likely to move than families in response to abortion bans. This pattern suggests that younger adults may be more responsive to changes in reproductive rights when making location decisions. This aligns with survey data showing particularly strong preferences about abortion access among younger Americans.