Announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as an executive order, the Mexico City
Policy (MCP) is driven by ideological beliefs that U.S. taxpayer dollars should not support
overseas family planning activities which attempt to discuss, promote, refer, or perform
abortions. The policy’s main goal was to reduce the number of abortions worldwide by attaching
conditionality to U.S. foreign assistance. This conditionality reduced the amount of funding
international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could receive if they did not agree to the
policy. Using a regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of the fact that the MCP was
reinstated by President Bush in 2001 and was repealed by President Obama in 2009, this paper
analyzes whether the policy had an impact on the rate of abortions in Ethiopia. The paper finds
statistically significant evidence that indicates women are less likely to have an induced abortion
when the MCP was in effect, and subsequently more abortions when the MCP was repealed.
While this may seem sufficient proof that the MCP had the intended effect of reducing abortions
in Ethiopia, I also find there is high measurement error in the data, causing significant bias that
render these results inconclusive as to the true impact of the policy on women’s health in
Ethiopia.