Notification and consent: the differential effects of parental involvement laws on teen abortion

US state legislation requiring parental involvement in the abortion decision of a minor has grown in prevalence since its origin in the 1970s. Today, 36 states impose a parental involvement requirement on their residents below the age of 18. These laws come in two primary categories: parental notification and parental consent. Though much research estimates the effects of these policies, limited evidence exists regarding any differential impact between parental notification and parental consent. This paper uses the synthetic control method to determine if the increased marginal cost of an abortion imposed by a parental consent statute affects the abortion rate and birth rate for minors relative to parental notification. Results indicate no evidence of a marginal effect of parental consent laws on the abortion/birth rate for minors overall, suggesting that the additional cost of a parental consent law may be small.

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Notes

Self-managed abortion refers to efforts by an individual to end a pregnancy on their own outside of the formal healthcare system.

With the exception of the state of Georgia, all states who provide ITOP reports indicate abortion counts consistent with the CDC reports. Georgia consistently reports lower abortion counts in their ITOP data. In the analysis, I choose to use 15–17 abortion rates from the Georgia ITOP system. Results, available upon request, show that the results of the analysis are robust to the exclusion of Georgia from the donor pool.

_=\frac_>\) , where \(_\) describes the rank of the treatment effect, and \(N\) is the number of control states.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Economics, Texas Christian University, Texas, TX, USA Graham Gardner

1. Graham Gardner