The Determinants and Impact of State Abortion Restrictions

MARSHALL H. MEDOFF * I Introduction IN 1973, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT in Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. The Court declared that state governments bad no right to interfere with a woman's access to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. During the second trimester states could regulate abortion access, provided that the state could demonstrate that it had a compelling interest in a woman's maternal health, The state was permitted to restrict abortion access during the third trimester, provided that the state could show it had an interest in potential life. In 1989, the Supreme Court indicated it was prepared to allow state legislatures to expand abortion laws. The Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services upheld a Missouri regulation that required physicians to conduct viability tests prior to performing an abortion and prohibited the use of public facilities or public personnel in the performance of abortions. This decision sent a signal to state governments that states could regulate abortions, provided that the restrictions did not impose an "undue burden" on a woman seeking an abortion. This Supreme Court decision had the effect of changing the abortion debate from the federal to the state level. Before this legal development most state abortion restrictions were challenged in federal court. The undue burden framework allowed states to reinstate such abortion restrictions as performance requirements, consent requirements, reporting regulations, conscience clauses and fetal viability regulations that heretofore had been declared unconstitutional. In the first year after the Webster decision, nearly 400 bills were introduced in state legislatures about abortion policy (NARAL Foundation 1991). Many believe it is in state legislatures where the battles are being fought over the restrictiveness of abortion laws and regulations. This underscores the importance of understanding the determinants of a state's abortion policy. Early studies of abortion, within the social sciences consisted primarily of numerical tabulations according to selected demographic characteristics (age, marital status, race). Medoff (1988), using 1982 cross-section data, was the first to estimate the demand for abortion after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. He found that abortion is negatively related to price and positively related to income. Later papers by Garbacz (1990), Haas-Wilson (1996) and Gohmann and Oshfeldt (1993) confirmed these results. Another area of abortion research used the Senate vote on the 1983 Hatch-Eagleton Constitutional Amendment to ban abortions in order to predict the likelihood that a state, if it had the opportunity, would vote to continue to allow abortions (Medoff 1989; Gohmann and Ohsfeldt 1990; and Chressanthis, Gilbert, and Grimes 1991). However, virtually no attention has been given to studying abortion policy at the state level. This paper addresses two important questions about state abortion policies. First, I examine their determinants. What are the factors that determine the restrictiveness of a state's abortion policy? Second, I estimate the impact these abortion restrictions have on a state's abortion rate. II The Model CONWAY AND BUTLER (1992) argue that voters may be affected by state abortion legislation either indirectly (abortions performed on others) or directly (abortions performed on themselves). The indirect effects may be positive if one believes in a woman's fundamental right to choose or negative if one believes abortion violates God's laws. The indirect demand for abortion legislation is written as: (1) [Q.sup.IDR.sub.i] = [B.sup.IDR] [X.sup.IDR.sub.i] where [Q.sup.IDR.sub.i] denotes the indirect demand for abortion legislation in state i, [X.sup.IDR.sub.i] is a vector of variables that influence the indirect demand for abortion legislation and [B. …