Presenter:

Bisakha Sen

Authors:

Bisakha Sen, Martha Wingate

Chair: Katherine Swartz; Discussant: Martha Bailey Mon June 5, 2006 17:15-18:45 Room 226

Rationale: The 1973 Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade gave American women the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy via abortion. Subsequently, many states have placed restrictions on abortion access, like denying public funding for abortion, requiring parental consent or notification for minors, and mandating waiting periods. Previous research has indicated that legalizing abortion reduced the prevalence of children living in poverty, in single-parent households, infant mortality, and child abuse. Analogously, it is probable that abortion restrictions would increase these and related phenomena.

Objectives: The objective of this study is to explore the association of state abortion restrictions to two child outcomes - fatal injuries from violence/homicide and fatal injuries from unintentional causes/accidents. The underlying logic is that abortion restrictions are likely to increase the number of ‘unwanted’ births - leading to child physical abuse and neglect, and also increase the number of births to women with inadequate resources and abilities to protect their children from harm.

Methodology: The study utilizes National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data over 1981-2001 on deaths to children aged <1 years to 5 years, where the ICD code shows cause of death to be violence or unintentional injury. The data includes information on states of death and birth. This is linked to state-level cross-sectional time-series data on the following abortion restrictions: enforced parental consent laws and parental notification laws, absence of public funding for abortion (barring cases of rape and incest), and mandatory waiting periods. Additional controls include the number of bordering states with no parental involvement law in effect, abortion-provider availability per 1000 women, state poverty rate, percentage of population in rural areas, per capita alcohol consumption, maximum monthly AFDC payments for family of 3, and existence of ‘family cap’ laws. The main hypothesis is that existence of abortion restrictions in the state and year of birth will be associated with subsequent increases in child fatal injury due to violence and due to unintentional causes. The study employs count data models with state and year fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, and further uses fatal injury rates among young adults from the same causes to control for time-variant state level unobservables. The analyses are done separately for white and black children.

Preliminary Results: Preliminary results using NCHS fatal injury data aggregated over the 0-4 year age-group (available from WISQAR, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) show that parental consent laws are associated with increases in violence-resultant fatal injury rates for white children, less so for black children; no public funding and mandatory waiting periods are associated with increases in unintentional fatal injury rates for black children. The results are robust to a variety of specification tests. This study is particularly relevant at this time, since recent changes in the U.S. Supreme court have raised questions about the future of abortion rights. It is important from a public policy perspective to understand the effects of existing abortion restrictions so as to gauge what the effects of future restrictions might be.