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

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.