%0 Journal Article
%T Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion Access in the United States
%A Marshall H. Medoff
%J International Journal of Population Research
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/254315
%X This study examines the relationship between state restrictive abortion laws and the incidence of unintended pregnancy. Using 2006 data about pregnancy intentions, the empirical results found that no Medicaid funding, mandatory counseling laws, two-visit laws, and antiabortion attitudes have no significant effect on the unintended pregnancy rate, unwanted pregnancy rate, unintended pregnancy ratio, or the unwanted pregnancy ratio. Parental involvement laws have a significantly negative effect on the unintended and unwanted pregnancy rates and ratios. This latter result suggests that parental involvement laws alter teen minors' risky sexual activity and that behavioral modification has a cumulative effect on the pregnancy avoidance behavior of adult women of childbearing age. The empirical results remain robust even after controlling for regional effects, outliers, and the two different types of parental involvement laws. 1. Introduction One in twenty American women had an unintended pregnancy in 2001 [1]. In 2001, almost half of the 6.4 million pregnancies were unintended and about half of these ended in abortion [1]. The costs to society from unintended pregnancies that end in unintended births have received considerable attention from social scientists. Sonfield et al. [2] estimated that the government costs on births from unintended pregnancies totaled $11.1 billion in 2006¡ª$6.5 billion were federal expenditures and $4.6 billion were state expenditures. Or equivalently, the federal government and state governments spent, in total, $180 on maternity and infant care on births from unintended pregnancies for every women of childbearing age 15¨C44 years in the United States in 2006. Unintended births also have numerous undesirable consequences including low birth weight, a greater risk of physical abuse and mental illness, and high rates of poverty, unemployment, and educational failure. There is a broad consensus among policymakers that reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancies is an important public and social policy goal. In fact, three of the explicit policy goals of the US Department of Health and Human Services Healthy People 2020 initiative was to (1) reduce the number of unintended births, without increasing the number of abortions; (2) increase the proportion of pregnancies that are intended; (3) increase the proportion of females at risk of an unintended pregnancy who used contraception at their most recent sexual intercourse. Of particular interest to social scientists are public policies that affect the costs to women of risky sexual
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijpr/2012/254315/