Do Pro-Life Laws Make a Difference?
By Rebecca Hagelin
Townhall.com Columnist
Friday, February 9, 2007
For 34 years, it’s been legal in America for mothers to kill their pre-born babies. It’s difficult to imagine that the culture my teenagers and so many young adults have grown up in has been this culture of death – they simply have no other frame of reference. Yet, even at the tender age of 14, knowing no other America but one in which abortion is legal, my daughter doesn’t understand why our nation allows such a heinous act to be inflicted on the innocent and voiceless. Common sense tells her it’s wrong. How can it be, she wonders? I have no answers.
It seems we don’t hear much about this national disgrace anymore -- no visual protests (other than the March for Life) or rescues grab headlines as they did in the late ’80s. But many brave warriors for the innocent are gaining ground -- small victories you don’t really hear about. For instance, pro-life legislators in South Dakota have again introduced a bill that would protect the pre-born from almost all “excuses” for abortion. Last year a similar bill passed the legislature but was narrowly defeated in a voter referendum.
There also is good news on the national front: We’re close to having a Supreme Court composed of a majority of justices who may see fit to overturn Roe v. Wade, should the right case appear before them. Also heartening is the great work being done on the state level to protect young women from the horror of abortion wherever possible. We can take hope in knowing that parental notification, informed consent and other such laws are effective in saving lives and in saving unsuspecting women from committing the unthinkable on their own babies.
According to a just-published Heritage Foundation paper by Michael New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, four types of pro-life laws have reduced the number of abortions. Laws dealing with parental involvement, informed consent, Medicaid funding restrictions and partial-birth abortion bans work.
The number of legal abortions declined by 18.4 percent during the 1990s. What effect did these laws have? The number of such laws rose dramatically in the ’90s. In 1992, for example, 20 states enforced parental-involvement statutes; by 2000, 32 did. In 1992, virtually no states had informed-consent laws (which stipulate that women are to be given medical facts about their unborn children and told about alternatives to abortion); by 2000, 27 states had such laws. And no state in 1992 prohibited partial-birth abortions; a dozen had done so by 2000.
Dr. New’s research reveals that Medicaid funding restrictions and parental-involvement laws made the biggest difference in curtailing abortions among minors. Laws mandating that parents be notified reduced the minor abortion rate by an average of 1.67 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 13 and 17. States with Medicaid funding restrictions in place saw 2.34 fewer abortions per 1,000. Doesn’t sound like a lot? To me, those numbers mean little girls my daughter’s age were spared the life-long trauma of having killed their own babies. Those numbers represent toddlers and grade-school children who otherwise would be dead.
Professor New’s conclusion may seem obvious. Pro-life laws were passed, the number of abortions dropped, so there must be a connection. But like any analyst worth his salt, New knows that correlation isn’t the same as causation. We need proof. After all, one could just as easily say that the abortion drop occurred because public opinion began shifting against abortion. Such a shift would prompt voters to elect pro-life politicians who would, in turn, pass pro-life laws. Ultimately, the theory goes, we can credit the shift in opinion, not the laws.
New compared the abortion rate among minors to the overall abortion rate in each category and found that the laws deserve much of the credit. Take informed-consent laws. If the drop in abortions came from a general change in values, we could expect to see roughly equal reductions in the abortion rate for adults and for minors. Instead, we find states with informed-consent laws experiencing a drop in the overall abortion rates twice as large as the reduction among minors. As New explains:
<<< “If minors seek abortions because they do not want to reveal their pregnancy or sexual activity to their parents, informed-consent laws that give them information about the development of their unborn children and private and public sources of support may have little impact on their decisions. Yet if adults seek abortions for reasons that are different from those of minors, such as financial hardship, informed-consent laws could have a larger impact on them. This provides further evidence that legislation is influencing decisions.” >>>
Professor New doesn’t completely dismiss the effect of public opinion, which has generally moved in a pro-life direction over the last 20 years. In the social sciences, you can’t conduct perfect, lab-quality experiments. But New demonstrates that pro-life laws have helped reduce the number of abortions. And that offers some small ray of hope to those of us who work and pray for the day when abortion is again declared illegal – not only because it destroys life, but because it victimizes the women who turn to it in desperation and fear.
“We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life-- the unborn -- without diminishing the value of all human life,” Ronald Reagan once said. Let’s remember that as we continue our efforts to protect the lives of the most helpless Americans among us.
Rebecca Hagelin is a vice president of The Heritage Foundation and author of Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture that's Gone Stark Raving Mad .
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