Child Car Seats as Birth Control?

Car seats cause fewer children to exist.

From the Journal of Law and Economics:

We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat. Women with two children younger than their state’s age mandate have a lower annual birth probability of .73 percentage points. This effect is limited to births of third children, households with access to a car, and households with a male present, where both front seats are likely to be occupied. We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.

 

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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