Another Critical Review of New's Reanalysis of the Impact of Antiabortion Legislation

Abstract

In New's response to our article he concedes that (1) his dataset had over 150 misclassification errors, (2) used an incorrect weight to correct for heteroscedasticity, (3) did not control for interstate travel by women to an out-of-state abortion provider, and (4) some of his empirical results are numerically implausible. Unfortunately, in New's reanalysis he makes many of the same errors as in his original article. Ironically, New's empirical evidence in Table 3 of his reassessment article corroborates our findings that informed consent laws (all statistically insignificant in his Table 3) had no measurable impact on the abortion rate of all women of childbearing age, adult women or teen minors over the period 1985- 2005. Moreover, New fails to acknowledge that he has a conflict of interest. He is an adjunct scholar with the self-proclaimed antiabortion Charlotte Lozier Institute. In addition, on September 15, 2012 at the annual meeting of Value Voters sponsored by the antiabortion Family Research Council, he told an audience of social conservatives that to stop abortions they should support legislation in states that would length the waiting period to have an abortion to nine months (audio available).