In a front-page article on March 6, 2006, The New York Timesattempts to make the case that parental involvement laws areineffective. However, better data, better analysis, and a morethorough reporting of the academic literature leads to the exactopposite conclusion: namely, that parental involvement laws havebeen effective at reducing the incidence of abortion among minors.
Analysis of a comprehensive dataset of minor abortion rates fromover 40 states over a span of 15 years indicates that parentalinvolvement legislation and other types of pro-life laws arecorrelated with reductions in the incidence of abortion amongminors. A set of natural experiments provides further evidence ofthe effectiveness of pro-life legislation.