female/male) and play a key role in the provision of reproductive health and contraceptive advice (see eg Finley Baba et al. (2020) for discussion). 5The contents of these norms were confirmed in a structured interview with a midwife. 5 quently rejected in line with the Mayor’s decision to provide or not provide the EC pill in the municipality (Casas Becerra, 2008). The only requirement for request is that women should be enrolled in the public health system, and associated with a health centre in the municipality. In Chile in the period under study around 3/4 of all fertile-aged women are enrolled in the public health system, with the remaining 1/4 enrolled in a the private health system.6 In the case of the quarter of women who have private health insurance, access to the EC pill required a prescription and could be purchased in a pharmacy at prices of around 18 USD (Casas Becerra, 2008). To our knowledge, comprehensive data on private provision of the EC pill is not available, though anecdotal evidence suggests limited availability in pharmacies around 2008–2009 (Congreso Nacional de Chile, 2010, p. 45) . While our aim in this paper is to assess the impact of the free public provision of the EC pill, we discuss how private provision interacts with our identification strategy below. 3 Data and Methods 3.1 Data We construct a municipality×year dataset based upon various sources of administrative health records and measures of EC pill availability. We include a number of time-varying controls to capture potential determinants of municipal-level rollout.7 Our data cover the 15 year period from 2002–2016, which we consider as (i) the pre-EC pill period of 2002-2008 which is used as a base6For example, in 2010, figures from FONASA, the public health insurance system, show there were 3,507,325 women enrolled, and figures from the National Institute of Statistics of Chile estimate the total population of fertileaged women was 4,574,965. This suggests 76.7% of fertile-aged women are enrolled in public health. On average, users of the public health system in Chile have a lower income, though the public health system is widely used across income quintiles (Frenz et al., 2013). 7The municipal determinants of the decision to provide the EC pill have been discussed in Bentancor and Clarke (2017). Among a large number of variables considered, EC pill provision was only robustly correlated with mayoral party, with provision less likely where mayors represented ‘conservative’ parties. As we discuss in the methods section, our estimates later in the paper do not rely on mayor characteristics being unrelated to the decision to provide the EC pill, just that they are not systematically related to both the precise moment the EC pill was made available, and other investments in maternal health. 6 line, (ii) the rollout period of 2009–2011 where we can measure municipal-level variation in availability, and (iii) the full supply period of 2012–2016. In both the “rollout” and “full supply” periods we perfectly observe the number of EC pills disbursed by the Chilean public health system, as we discuss at more length below. Measures of maternal health Our object of interest, maternal morbidity, is measured by two outcomes: the rate of abortion related morbidity and the rate of hemorrhage early in pregnancy. Abortion-related causes is a variable often examined in the wider literature when considering the impacts of unsafe abortion and includes all forms of morbidity classified as one of ICD-10 codes O02-O08 (for instance, spontaneous abortion and complications following induced terminations). This coding is provided in Singh and Maddow-Zimet (1999). Secondly, we consider “haemorrhage prior to 20 weeks of gestation” (ICD-10 code O20). This outcome is of interest (a) given its importance as one of the major complications of unsafe abortions (Gerdts et al., 2013; World Health Organization, 2018) and (b) given that it may plausibly respond to the arrival of the EC pill, due to the widespread use of misoprostol as an abortifacient agent in clandestine abortions prior to the availability of the EC pill in Chile. Discussions of the relationship between misoprostol use, clandestine abortion, and haemorrhage are provided in Clarke and Mühlrad (2018); Pourette et al. (2018); Grimes et al. (2006). The key potential mechanism of action is that safe EC pill usage may crowd out unsupervised and potentially unsafe use of misoprostol, which can result in severe bleeding. Estimates from medical literature suggest that 22% of deaths due to haemorrhage in the first trimester are caused by abortion (Haeri and Dildy, 2012) (similar values are not reported for non-mortal complications) lending weight to this suggested link. We generate municipality level rates of these events from high-quality micro-data registers recording all inpatient hospitalizations in the country, which are available from 2001–2017. These records consist of an observation for 7 each inpatient stay, and include a limited number of covariates such as patient’s sex and age, the ICD10 code registering the reason for the stay, and the date of entry and exit.8 While we capture any hospitalization using this data, we will not observe any ambulatory visits to primary care clinics. In general these visits will be far less serious. It is however important to note that all estimates in the paper do not account for these cases.9