"For all the passions they
generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or
get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have
produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some
advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.
"The analysis, which looked at six
states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last
decade and is believed to be the first study to include data
from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent
trends."
From
"Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told," New
York Times, March 6
"And now, according
to a study by Baruch College researchers that was published
today in the New England Journal of Medicine, those
[parental involvement] laws seem to be having a significant
impact decreasing the rate of abortions among minors."
From "Study Suggests Parental Notification
Laws Reduce Abortions:
Texas
Abortion Rates See Double-Digit Drop Among Teen Girls"
Associated Press
March 8
Sometimes wildly
divergent conclusions, such as illustrated in the two quotes
reprinted above, are relatively easy to explain. Other times,
the explanation takes a Ph.D. in statistics. What we see in the
case of the story by the two New York Times reporters and
the study reported yesterday in the New England Journal of
Medicine falls somewhere in between.
So, who is wrong?
While the NEJM would never be accused of harboring
pro-life sentiments, it is the Times which routinely
editorializes in its news stories and has long acted as a
blocking back for the Abortion Establishment trying to move
their agenda down field.
To explain where
Andrew Lehren and John Leland went wrong, I borrow liberally
from Michael New's analysis which appeared at nationalreview.com.
Over the past few years Prof. New has done yeoman work
demonstrating how parental involvement laws lower the number and
rate of teenage abortions.
Referring to the
Times story, New writes, "In 6 states, the authors
track the percentage of abortions among pregnancies for girls
under 18 both before and after the passage of
parental-involvement legislation. According to the data
presented by the authors, the passage of legislation appears to
do little to change this percentage."
Some of the deficiencies are obvious,
while others more subtle. For some strange reason,
Lehren and Leland went to state health
departments ("which tend to be unreliable") for their data. As
anyone who follows the abortion debate knows, serious
investigators go the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) and the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
And why only six states? As New points
out, some "12 states that have passed parental-involvement laws
since the mid 1990s."
Another key weakness is what New
characterizes as the authors' "puzzling" decision "to analyze
the percentage of abortions among pregnancies."
"Since relatively small numbers of
teens are giving birth," New writes, "this percentage can
dramatically fluctuate, making the data difficult to properly
analyze."
And none of this even begins to
grapple with the commonsensical impact of parental involvement
laws. They may "reduce abortions by not only changing the
decisions of girls who are already pregnant, but also by
reducing the likelihood that teen girls will get pregnant in the
first place."
In previously published studies, New
has done a much fuller analysis of the six states addressed by
the Times story, using CDC data. In his
nationalreview.com article he points out that, for technical
reasons, he couldn't analyze the impact on one state. However,
in three others states, following passage of parental
involvement laws, New found "significant reductions in the teen
abortion rate."
New also notes, "It is true that in
the remaining two states, Idaho and Tennessee, the passage of
parental-involvement laws seems to have had little immediate
short-term effect on each state's teen abortion rate." But, he
writes, "additional information about each state provides some
important context.
"Idaho already had one of the lowest
teen abortion rates in the country prior to the passage of a
parental-consent law. Similarly, Tennessee's teen abortion rate
fluctuated little in the years following the passage of its
parental consent law in 2000. However, Tennessee's teen abortion
rate fell sharply in the year before the passage of the law. It
seems possible that Tennessee's law might have played a role in
preserving this decline."
Let me quickly move beyond rebutting
the Times' less-than-stellar effort. (I was told the
story sank without a bubble. Evidently, those in the know easily
recognized the numbers didn't add up.)
The NEJM study compared what
happened in the three years after the Texas parental involvement
law took effect January 1, 2000 with the two years prior. The
law requires that abortionists notify a parent of a minor girl
[17 and under] seeking an abortion at least 48 hours in advance.
The declines were quite remarkable.
This reduction is also significant in light of the fact (as the
authors of the study put it) that "Texas is geographically the
largest and most populous state to enforce a parental
involvement law."
Among 15-year-olds,
the abortion rate declined by 11%. Among 16-year-olds, the
abortion rate declined by 20%. And among 17-year-olds, the
abortion rate declined by 16 %. (For reasons that are hard to
pin down, there was "a [slight] increase in the odds" of
second-trimester abortion for one tiny subcategory of
girls--those 17.5 to 17.74 years of age when they conceived.)
Ask yourself why
are pro-abortionists so adamant that it makes no difference--in
fact it may make things worse--to notify parent[s] when a minor
girl is about to have an abortion? There are lots of reasons. My
guess that near the top is the same reason they make up
fantastic stories about who has partial-birth abortions and why.
And that is simply
because there is widespread support for banning partial-birth
abortions and for including parents in this life-and-death
decision. It's almost as if the more the public supports such
protective legislation, the more pro-abortionists are determined
to cook the books to "prove" that these laws are, at best,
unproductive, at worse counterproductive.
But it's all for
naught. More states will pass parental involvement laws. Other
states will tighten the laws they already have on the books.
And perhaps one day
we will have a federal law that recognizes that we are all
better off if youngsters are strongly encouraged to tell their
parents they are pregnant.
Pro-abortionists
hate this. So what else is new?
If you have any
comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at
dandrusko@nrlc.org.
