What Studies Show on Parental Involvement for Abortions Performed on Minors
Adapted from Chapter 15 of Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion
Natural Experiments
A “natural experiment” can happen when there’s a specific group that a certain thing happens to and another group that it doesn’t happen to. So researchers only need to collect the data and figure out what happened.
When some states had regulations in effect one year, but not the previous year, while other states stayed the same, then researchers have data to work with. Also, since parental consent laws only matter to minors, minors could be compared to adults in the same state
The natural experiment of parental involvement laws – ones requiring either parental notification or consent for minors, with a judicial bypass – allows for comparisons of abortion and birthrates immediately before and after laws go into effect.
Abortion Rates Drop
The most commonly observed immediate impact is a drop in the first-trimester abortion rate among minors, but not among teenagers who aren’t minors (aged 18 and 19). This was found along with no increase in the birthrate for Minnesota and Texas and several states.
Deborah Haas-Wilson finds with four ways of estimating involving several states, controlling for different variables, that parental involvement laws are associated with abortion demand dropping 13 to 25% among minors.
Ohsfeldt & Gohmann, in doing state-level analysis from several states, find a larger drop in the abortion rate and a smaller drop in the pregnancy rate.
In Massachusetts, researchers found the dramatic reduction in in-state abortions for minors was accounted for by the number who went to neighboring states, concluding the 1981 law had no immediate impact on pregnancy avoidance. Massachusetts is a small state; if surrounding states didn’t have parental involvement laws, travel would be fairly easy.
In Arkansas, a legislative change from parental notification to parental consent appeared to make no difference. The inability to keep a pregnancy hidden from parents is the same in either case.
Complexities
Some authors point out a possible misclassification bias: minors late in the year of being 17 may wait until they’re 18 to have an abortion. They’re counted in the reduction for minors, but included in the abortion rate for the older group to which it’s being compared. A large portion of those who continue a pregnancy that started at age 17 don’t give birth until they’re 18, and many births among 18-year-olds come from pregnancies begun at age 17. Authors tried to resolve this with exact birth dates for the minor’s age, and gestational ages giving approximate conception times. They found that while the abortion rate did fall, the pregnancy rate had been under-counted. More childbirth was happening due to the abortion decline, but after minors were no longer minors.
Other authors considered whether parental involvement laws made abortions occur later in pregnancy. While the proportion of second-trimester abortions increased, this was not due to a rise in absolute numbers. A reduction in first-trimester abortions made late-term abortions a higher percentage of the total.
Long-Term Impact
Marshall Medoff asked whether the impact is long-term:
Parental involvement laws reduced the likelihood of teen minor females (under 18 years of age) having unwanted pregnancies by altering their frequency of unprotected sexual activity or contraceptive use. This change in teen minors’ pregnancy avoidance behavior is found to be perpetuated over adult women’s childbearing span of 18-44 years of age. Parental involvement laws are estimated to account for approximately one-third of the decline in the abortion rates of adult women of childbearing age over the period 1982-2000. The empirical results remain robust even after controlling for outliers, interstate migration, regional effects, and the presence of a waiting period.
Fewer Suicides?
Sabia & Rees (2012) used state-level data on suicides from 1987-2003. They found states with parental involvement laws were associated with an 11% to 21% reduction in suicides among females 15-17 years old, but had no impact on males in that age group or on older females.
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