Scant drop seen in abortion rate if parents are told.

Source: NY Times

The laws put into effect that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion have failed to produce the sharp drop anti-abortion advocates had hoped for.

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.

Laws like this make great election year tools, and that's about it. What a waste of time, energy, and resources all the way around this issue.

Basically, the whole parental consent thing backfired in the faces of right-to-lifers who had hoped to collect enough data to show (their beliefs in) that abortions are only done by dirty girls who don't want their parents knowing that they have sex. In some states, the abortion rate did drop, but oddly, in other states, the abortion rate went up only after the parental consent law was enacted. Not the data they were hoping for, obviously.

By the way, the states from which they collected data? All red states.