Roe at 35, part III

There is, of course, some good news to report about abortions: today they’re down by 25% when compared to 1990. Advocates of abortion-on-demand will argue that this is due to changing economic realities and increased access to contraception, but not the results of pro-life legislation or pro-life candidates. Michael J. New, professor of political science at the University of Alabama, takes a decidedly different position . After highlighting the many media and quasi-academic attempts to downplay the role of pro-life efforts, New concludes with this:

Now in reality, there exists plenty of good evidence that changes in the legal status of abortion have a real impact on the incidence of abortion. U.S. history should give supporters of abortion rights pause. Between 1973, the year of the Roe v. Wade decision, and 1980, the number of abortions performed in the United States more than doubled. Furthermore, there is also evidence that this liberalization of abortion policy had a significant impact on sexual mores. The years following Roe v. Wade saw significant increases in both sexual activity and the number of conceptions.

Articles that have appeared in peer reviewed academic journals provide further evidence that legally restricting abortion results in reductions in abortion rates and ratios. A 2004 study that appeared in The Journal of Law and Economics analyzed how changes in abortion policies in post-communist Eastern Europe affected the incidence of abortion. This study was particularly interesting because after the demise of communism, some Eastern European countries liberalized their abortion laws, while others enacted restrictions on abortion. At any rate, the authors concluded that modest restrictions on abortion reduced abortion rates by around 25 percent.

Furthermore, a study that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 found that a Texas parental-involvement law led to statistically significant reductions in the number of abortions performed on minors (both in and out of state) and a slight, but statistically significant increase in the teen birthrate. Finally, my own Heritage Foundation research on state level pro-life legislation which utilizes data from both the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control provides evidence that informed consent laws, public-funding restrictions, and parental-involvement laws are all correlated with reductions in the incidence of abortion.

Interestingly, even some studies that have appeared in the Alan Guttmacher Institute’s own Family Planning Perspectives provide evidence that pro-life legislation at the state level reduces the incidence of abortion. While Guttmacher typically does not trumpet these findings, they are real nonetheless. As such, before the media and pro-choice activists insist that the incidence of abortion is unaffected by its legal status and attempts to legally restrict abortion are doomed to failure, they may want to consider looking at the trends and reviewing the research — including research published by organizations that support legal abortion.