The New York Times predicts that 22 states would ban abortion if Roe v. Wade ceased to be good law and estimates the impact of that quantitatively. The darkest parts of the legend represent a drop in legal abortions of about 45%. Gray areas would have no drop. Yellow areas would decline by less than 5%.
We may find out how accurate these predictions are in less than a year.
More affluent women would travel to states where abortion remained legal or would obtain drugs that induce early term abortions.
Many women, disproportionately those who are poor, would unwillingly carry their babies to term and rely on a social safety net that is thinner than in most other rich nations, and thinner in some states than in others.Without Roe, the number of legal abortions in the country would fall by at least 14 percent, according to research by a team from Middlebury College; the University of California, San Francisco; and the Guttmacher Institute, based on the effects of clinic closures in Texas between 2013 and 2016.
Ohio, where I grew up and went to college, Georgia, where I was born, and Michigan, where I went to law school and have extended family, would all be greatly affected.
UPDATE December 19, 2021:The New York Times analysis is based mostly on this study:
Between 2011 and 2014, Texas enacted three pieces of legislation that significantly reduced funding for family planning services and increased restrictions on abortion clinic operations. Together this legislation creates cross-county variation in access to abortion and family planning services, which we leverage to understand the impact of family planning and abortion clinic access on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases. In response to these policies, abortions to Texas residents fell 20.5%and births rose 2.6% in counties that no longer had an abortion provider within 50 miles. Changes in the family planning market induced a 1.5% increase in births for counties that no longer had a publicly funded family planning clinic within 25 miles. Meanwhile, responses of retail purchases of condoms and emergency contraceptives to both abortion and family planning service changes were minimal.
From an NBER paper from 2017 by Stefanie Fischer and Corey White..
4 comments:
It's an interesting analysis, but it (and others like it) ignores the obvious: The current make of the US Supreme Court will not merely return the law to the pre-Roe jurisprudence, where states MAY ban abortion. They* will declare, likely in an extensive obiter dictum, that abortion is murder, and states can't allow murder of the unborn without legalizing murder completely, which they doubtlessly also won't allow.
*5-4 rather than 6-3 for this bit, probably.
This was the course of abortion law in Germany. I doubt that you are correct, however, in part, because the structure of American constitutional law is different. It often provides that government may not do something, it rarely requires governments to do something.
To andrew: You may have a point in general. But this court has ALREADY ordered the Federal government to re-start the "Stay in Mexico" policy, despite this impinging on international diplomacy, which was traditionally left almost entirely to the discretion of the executive branch, and in principle is a plenary power of congress. They also basically tossed the 14th amendment in the garbage by ruling, in flat defiance of obvious reality, that certain key provisions of the Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional as applied today. In short, you apparently think that the court's majority care a whit about making constitutionally valid rulings, when they've actually shown repeatedly that they only care about getting their preferred policy outcomes.
I don't doubt that outcomes are policy driven. But that doesn't mean that the form of the way that policy gets inserted into decision making isn't driven by the structure of our government and by the structure of our jurisprudence. Also, SCOTUS hasn't forgotten the "switch in time that saved nine" on the Lochner court and knows that if it is too bold that a consensus to pack the court will develop and undermine their long term objectives.
SCOTUS has a longer time horizon than any other branch of government at any level in the U.S. with the possible exception of local cemetery districts.
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