Analyzing the Impact of U.S. Antiabortion Legislation in the Post-Casey Era: A Reassessment

Marshall Medoff and Christopher Dennis identify some errors in National Abortion Rights Action League's (NARAL) data on the effective start dates of various state-level antiabortion laws. However, they misunderstand the purpose of my 2011 State Politics and Policy Quarterly article which was to measure the impact of a range of antiabortion laws—not analyze competing theories as to why the abortion rate has fallen in the United States. Furthermore, their analysis contains a number of critical measurement, and methodological and estimation errors. When these errors are corrected, the empirical results add to the substantial body of peer-reviewed research which finds that public funding restrictions, parental involvement laws, and properly designed informed consent laws all reduce the incidence of abortion.