Earlier this month, the journal Health Affairs published a study that purportedly finds that pro-life laws lead to an increase in intimate-partner violence. The researchers suggest that pro-life laws increase both overall homicide rates and intimate-partner homicide rates for females between the ages of ten and 44. This study was covered by mainstream media outlets including the Huffington Post, HealthNews.com, Yahoo! News, and NewsNation.
Unsurprisingly, there is far less here than meets the eye. This is for several reasons. First, the study analyzes data from 2014 to 2020. During that period, abortion was legal in all 50 states and every state had at least one abortion facility. Contrary to what some casual readers might have believed, this study did not analyze pro-life laws that took effect post-Dobbs. Second, the only type of pro-life law analyzed by the researchers are Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws.
TRAP laws ensure that abortion facilities have basic safety requirements. There might be some evidence that TRAP laws reduce the number of abortion facilities in a given state. However, there is no body of research that finds that TRAP laws result in a consistent decline in the abortion rate. Other types of pro-life laws, including parental-involvement laws and limits on Medicaid funding of abortion, have been shown to consistently reduce the incidence of abortion. However, these types of pro-life laws were not analyzed in the study.
Also, it is not clear how many states enacted TRAP laws between 2014 and 2020. If few states enacted TRAP laws during that time, the data to compare domestic violence rates both before and after the TRAP law took effect would be scarce. Finally, the authors do not analyze data from California, Florida, and Texas. And to judge from the number of data points analyzed, the authors have incomplete data from other states as well.
Supporters of legal abortion have always tried to argue that pro-life laws have negative consequences. They have intensified those efforts after the Dobbs decision of June 2022. So far their studies have not found much. A study claiming that pro-life laws worsened the mental health of women found only marginal effects. Additionally, new data show that the U.S. maternal-mortality rate declined in 2022. This most recent study on intimate-partner violence does not even analyze post-Dobbs data. As always, pro-lifers would do well to stay the course.