Social Policy and Abortion: A Review of the Research

Abstract

Since the Supreme Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion, many states have enacted laws restricting women's access to an abortion. There has been considerable empirical research on the impact of these restrictive state abortion laws on women's pregnancy resolution decisions. This paper reviews the empirical evidence regarding restric- tions on abortion access. The empirical evidence indicates that demand-side policies (i.e., No Medicaid Funding, Parental Involvement Laws, Mandatory Counseling Laws, Mandatory Waiting Periods Laws, Partial-Birth Abortion Bans) have little effect on the incidence of abortion. TRAP laws, which are supply-side policies, have the greatest effect reducing abortion services. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion recognized that states have the right to regulate the procedure. During the first trimester of preg- nancy, states could not enact any laws or regulations that restricted a woman's access to an abortion. During the sec- ond trimester, states could enact laws regulating abortion access, but only if the law had a compelling interest in pro- tecting a pregnant woman's maternal health. During the third trimester, when the fetus is viable, states could enact laws restricting or even prohibiting abortions provided there was a medical exception to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman. In 1992, the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey rejected Roe's rigid trimester pregnancy framework of state abortion regulation and replaced it with the standard. The court ruled that states could impose restrictions on a woman's ac- cess to an abortion provided that the state law or regulation did not have … the purpose or effect of placing a substan- tial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus. The ambiguity of the undue burden stan- dard enabled many states to enact a variety of restrictive abortion laws. Restrictive state abortion laws may influence the likeli- hood of women terminating an unwanted pregnancy in two ways. First, restrictive abortion laws may increase the finan- cial costs (e.g., out-of-pocket cost of the abortion, expenses on travel and accommodations, lost work time, childcare expenses) and the emotional costs (e.g., guilt, remorse, re- gret, humiliation, psychological trauma) incurred by women