Parental Notification Laws Work.

"For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by the New York Times shows.

"The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends."

From "Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate If Parents Are Told," New York Times, March 6

"And now, according to a study by Baruch College researchers that was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, those [parental involvement] laws seem to be having a significant impact decreasing the rate of abortions among minors."

From "Study Suggests Parental Notification Laws Reduce Abortions: Texas Abortion Rates See Double-Digit Drop among Teen Girls," Associated Press, March 8

Sometimes wildly divergent conclusions, such as illustrated in the two quotes reprinted above, are relatively easy to explain. Other times, the explanation takes a Ph.D. in statistics. What we see in the case of the story by two New York Times reporters and the study reported in the March 9 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) falls somewhere in between.

So, who is wrong? While the NEJM would never be accused of harboring pro-life sentiments, it is the Times which routinely editorializes in its news stories and acts as a blocking back for the Abortion Establishment trying to move its agenda downfield.