This article provides new evidence that family planning programs are associated with a
decrease in the share of children and adults living in poverty. Our research design exploits
the county roll-out of US family planning programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s and
examines their relationship with poverty rates in the short and longer-term in public census
data. We find that cohorts born after federal family planning programs began were less
likely to live in poverty in childhood and that these same cohorts were less likely to live in
poverty as adults