A Critical Reexamination of the Effect of Antiabortion Legislation in the Post-Casey Era

Abstract

Michael J. New, in a recent article in this journal, argues that a major reason for the decline in the incidence of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was the increased number of antiabortion laws—parental involvement laws and informed consent laws—enacted at the state level. However, New's analysis contained critical data, measurement, methodological and estimation errors. This article details all the errors and then reexamines the effect of restrictive state abortion laws on the incidence of abortion over the period 1985–2005. The empirical results find little evidence that the decline in the number of abortions performed since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was due to the increase in the number of informed consent and parental involvement laws enacted.

Factors associated with the timing of abortions

“…The primary alternative to the CDC abortion data are from the Guttmacher Institute. Although those data include abortions for all states and are considered to be more reliable (Medoff & Dennis, ), they are only reported periodically and are not publicly available. Further, CDC data have been found to reflect trends observed in the Guttmacher Institute data (Jones & Jerman, ).…”

“…New (2011) reassessed the issue and found that Medicaid funding restrictions were associated with a decrease in the abortion rate by 8% to 9 %. Medoff and Dennis (2014) argue that New (2011) misclassifies the presence and timing of the state Medicaid funding restrictions and fails to account for interstate travel among women receiving abortions. However, they too found a decrease in the abortion rate due to the restrictions, ranging from approximately 6% to 9%.…”

“…"Informed consent" regulations are abortion-specific laws that require abortion providers to give state-approved information to patients regarding possible complications, side effects, and other information depending on the state. Although such policies may appear to be potentially related to the timing of abortions, Medoff and Dennis (2014) note that the vast majority of these restrictions do not demand physicians to verbally provide the information but instead require that it be provided via printed materials or the internet. They found that these regulations are not empirically related to abortion utilization and, when incorporated in our analysis, were similarly found to not be associated with abortion rates or percentages.…”

“…Table lists the states in which the Medicaid funding or parental involvement regulation changed in that state during our sample period. The parental involvement requirement variable is taken from Myers and Ladd (), whereas various press reports, state legal documents, and published data from earlier research (Medoff & Dennis, ) were used to create our Medicaid funding variable.…”

Social Policy and Abortion: A Review of the Research

“…Medoff [27,36,37] found that, over the time period 1982-2005, mandatory waiting periods in general and twovisit laws in particular have no effect on the overall incidence of abortion. Similarly, Bitler and Zavodny [7] found that, over the period 1974-1997, mandatory waiting periods had no significant effect on the overall abortion rate, but did increase the percentage of abortions performed after the first trimester of pregnancy.…”