"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 two New York Times reporters and the study reported in the March 9 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) 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 acts as a blocking back for the Abortion Establishment trying to move its agenda downfield.

To explain where Andrew Lehren and John Leland went wrong it helps to borrow liberally from Michael New's analysis, which appeared at www.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 are 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 to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
And why only six states? As New points out, some "12 states ... 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." New writes, "Since relatively small numbers of teens are giving birth, 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," according to New.

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 other 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."

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.)

Why are pro-abortionists so very 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. 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 worst 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?