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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Marshall H. Medoff  and
Christopher Dennis
Marshall H. Medoff*
Affiliation:
California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
Christopher Dennis
Affiliation:
California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
*
Marshall H. Medoff, California State University, Long Beach, Department of Economics, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA, 90840, USA. Email: [email protected]
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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.

Keywords

abortionantiabortion legislationpro-life legislation
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 207 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014

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