Much of the academic literature that analyzes U.S. state-level restrictions on abortion focuses on parental involvement laws and the extent to which abortion is publicly funded through Medicaid. However, one shortcoming common to all of these studies is that they fail to analyze informed consent laws and other types of anti-abortion legislation that received constitutional protection through the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). In this study, a series of regressions on a comprehensive time series cross-sectional data set provides evidence that several types of state-level anti-abortion legislation result in statistically significant declines in both the abortion rate and the abortion ratio. Furthermore, a series of natural experiments provide further evidence that abortion restrictions are correlated with reductions in the incidence of abortion.
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