The Impact of Women's Representation in State Legislatures on the Introduction of Reproductive Legislation

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a significant rise in both female representation at the state level and state-level restrictions on reproductive rights. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of December 30, 2020, 29 states demonstrated "hostility" towards abortion rights, in comparison to only 16 states that demonstrated support for abortion. Simultaneously, as the political climate towards reproductive healthcare intensifies, in 2019 there was the largest number of women elected at one time to state legislatures nationwide. Inspired by these two trends, this study investigates how the presence of women in state legislatures impacts the introduction of reproductive legislation. This study utilizes intersectional feminist theory on women's representation and reproductive legislation to create a lens to evaluate both legislation introduced and women's demographics in three state legislatures (Texas, Georgia, and New York) based on affiliation with the levels of hostility towards abortion created by the Guttmacher Institute. This study's theoretical framework necessitates multiple hypotheses evaluating how different types of women impact reproductive legislation being introduced, specifically in relation to restrictive and nonrestrictive reproductive legislation. To address this, each state legislature's demographic trends of different types of women are tracked for the time of this study, from 2011 through 2020. Also, a new dataset of reproductive legislation was created for this study to evaluate different categories of reproductive legislation beyond abortion. The trends shown in these datasets provide a new perspective in this area of research, and hopefully, these trends provide the justification for further research in this area specifically in relation to how women impact the introduction of different forms of reproductive legislation.