State Abortion Policy and Unintended Birth Rates in the United States

Marshall H. Medoff ()
Additional contact information
Marshall H. Medoff: California State University, Long Beach

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2016, vol. 129, issue 2, No 6, 589-600

Abstract: Abstract Restrictive state abortion laws make it more difficult and costly for women to obtain an abortion. The fundamental law of demand posits that an increase in the cost of an abortion should cause the number of abortions to decrease. This suggests that restrictive state abortion laws should cause women with unintended pregnancies to have fewer abortions and concomitantly more unintended births. This paper investigates the impact four restrictive state abortion laws—No Medicaid Funding, Parental Involvement, Mandatory Counseling and Waiting Periods—have on the unintended birth rates of the 50 US states for the year 2006. Using a variety of methodologies, the empirical results show that, contrary to the theoretical prediction, these four antiabortion laws do not have a significant positive effect on unintended birth rates.

Keywords: Abortion; Unintended birthrates; Restrictive abortion laws (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-015-1135-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:129:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-015-1135-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-015-1135-y

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().