Abortion Restrictions and the Child Welfare System—Reply

Abstract

COMMENT & RESPONSEIn Reply We appreciate Li and Liu for their interest in our research. 1 In their letter, Li and Liu highlight the importance of incorporating many drivers that lead a family to need the foster care system, such as socioeconomic status, social assistance, and racial prejudice. We agree and would highlight several ways that we controlled for these factors in our models: median state income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families caseload (a financial assistance program for families), and an indicator for whether a state has expanded Medicaid. Additionally, we included a full set of indicators for each state to account for all time-invariant differences across states and a full set of indicators for each year to account for any differences by year that are common across states. These adjust for many other possible confounding factors to the extent possible. We also included several subanalyses by race in the original study.In addition, Li and Liu note that we do not account for alternate abortion coping techniques. While this is beyond the scope of the main analysis of our article, we agree with Li and Liu, offering a discussion of this in the limitations section of our original article. In particular, we note that any spillover effects to other types of coping with abortion restrictions would actually bias our estimates downward. Thus, as we state in our article, our finding would constitute a lower bound for the true association of abortion restrictions on foster care entries.