The New York Times reports, based on its study of six states, that parental-consent and parental-notification laws do not reduce abortion as a percentage of pregnancies.
The New York Times reports, based on its study of six states, that
parental-consent and parental-notification laws do not reduce abortion
as a percentage of pregnancies. The methodology is uncannily reminiscent
of Glen Harold Stassen's 2004 finding that abortion rates had
increased under President Bush. In both cases, the researchers relied on
state health departments' statistics rather than the more
authoritative numbers of the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers
for Disease Control. In both cases, the researchers looked at only a
handful of states. Stassen's work is now universally discredited.
The Times" writers' similarly counterintuitive result almost
surely will follow suit. Michael New, a professor at the University of
Alabama, has looked at CDC numbers for all the states and found that
parental-involvement laws have contributed to substantial declines in
the abortion rate for minors. His data are a little older than those
examined by the Times. As we await a more thorough debunking, we hope
that the people who fell for Stassen's research--we mean you,
Nicholas Kristof, Hillary Clinton, Andrew Sullivan, and Howard
Dean--don't put their foot in it again.
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