Parental Consent Laws and Abortion

An interesting article from the New York Times about the effectiveness of parental consent laws in various states. According to the article, these laws do little to stop or even lower the abortion rate among teens, which is one of the major aims of the laws. As the article reports:

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.


Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes