municipality, and other contraceptive coverage in the country. Our estimates suggest that upon arrival of the EC pill, municipalities which disburse the EC pill see improvements in maternal health outcomes compared with municipalities which had not yet provided the EC pill. We observe that this effect is most marked in municipalities where there was particularly high request and granting of the EC pill. We additionally observe some suggestive evidence that the opposite result obtains when EC requests are refused: conditional on fixed municipal and time characteristics, abortion morbidity and morbidity due to haemorrhage early in pregnancy are higher when a higher proportion of requests for access to the EC pill are denied. The roll-out of the EC pill in the Chilean public health system is emblematic, given that there was sub-national variation in availability over a number of years, and an absence of alternative post-coital reproductive control outcomes in the country. This paper joins a small number of studies examining the EC pill in Chile including recent work by Nuevo-Chiquero and Pino (2019), considerably updating and extending earlier work of Bentancor and Clarke (2017), as well as a 3 number of studies examining the EC pill’s impact in the USA, UK and other countries (Gross et al., 2014; Durrance, 2013; Girma, 2006, 2011; Mulligan, 2015; Moreau et al., 2009; Hu et al., 2005). However, these studies focus nearly exclusively on fertility outcomes and the prevalence of sexually transmitted infection. In what remains of the paper, we first provide some background on the nature of the expansion of the EC pill in Chile. We then describe the various sources of administrative data used in this paper in section 3.1, and the estimation methodology in section 3.2. We provide all results in section 4, and a brief discussion and conclusion in section 5. 2 Background on The EC Pill and its Rollout in Chile The EC pill is a post-coital contraceptive which can be taken in the day(s) following unprotected sexual intercourse to reduce the likelihood of conception (von Hertzen et al., 2002). In Chile, the rollout of the EC pill followed a lengthy legislative process resulting in periods of sub-national (municipal) variation in availability of the medication. We note that abortion was illegal in Chile for the entire period of interest of this study, only being legalised in the case of three limited circumstances in 2017.3 A full discussion of the rollout is provided in Casas Becerra (2008) and Nuevo-Chiquero and Pino (2019); Bentancor and Clarke (2017) (whose empirical strategies we broadly follow). Here we provide a brief overview of the rollout and the way this interacts with our identification strategy (discussed below). Interested readers are directed to Online Appendix B, or the aforementioned references, where fuller details are available. Until 2008, the EC pill was completely unavailable in Chile, or available for only very short temporal windows and in limited cases (such as in case of rape). From 2008, a legal finding im3A discussion of induced abortion in Chile over this period is provided by Prada and Ball (2016). This report cites figures suggesting anywhere between 60,000-300,000 clandestine abortions p.a., and highlights that there have been few changes in the methods of clandestine abortion used from 1990 onwards, apart from growing use of misoprostol. 4 plied that mayors in each of the country’s 346 municipalities could dictate whether the EC pill was available from local primary care clinics (Dides et al., 2009; Dides C. et al., 2010, 2011). There were subsequent legal challenges to EC pill availability, but in practice around half of Chilean municipalities reported that they disbursed the EC pill in the years following the 2008 finding, with the remainder either not providing the EC pill, or only providing it in very restricted circumstances. This municipal variation in EC pill availability lasted for around three years. Between 2010 and 2013 there were a number of legal findings which gradually opened access to the EC pill to the entire country. For the sake of our analysis, we consider the period of 2009–2011 to be the period in which there is considerable municipality-level variation in EC pill availability. The end of this period in 2011 was with the passage of national law 20533 which modifies the sanitary code to allow midwives to provide the EC pill. The fact that midwives were explicitly allowed to provide EC pill is important given that all EC pill requests through the Chilean public health system are chanelled through midwives. Public provision of the EC pill in Chile is completely free, with users simply required to request the medication at their local primary care clinic. To do so, they must make an appointment with a midwife at the clinic, as midwives4 are indicated by law as responsible for providing sexual health advice and contraceptive access (Congreso Nacional de Chile, 2010). This is the same procedure necessary to request any publicly provided contraceptive method including condoms, oral contraceptive pills or injectable contraceptives (which are all also freely provided). Following 2011, according to the National Norms of Fertility, all midwives are obliged to provide the EC pill upon request provided that the sexual encounter occurred within the last 5 days.5 Prior to the laws clarifying access (discussed at more length in Appendix B) requests were fre4These are known as matronas/matrones (if