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.