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Does Parental Consent for Birth Control Affect Underage Pregnancy Rates? The Case of Texas

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Demography

Abstract

Previous work based on conjectural responses of minors predicted that the 2003 Texas requirement for parental consent for state-funded birth control to minors would lead to a large increase in underage pregnancies. We use state- and county-level data to test this prediction. The latter allow us to compare the impact of parental consent in counties with and without state-funded family planning clinics. We control for characteristics systematically correlated with the presence of state-funded clinics by combining difference-in-difference estimation with propensity score–weighted regressions. The evidence suggests that the parental consent mandate led to a large decrease in attendance at family planning clinics among teens but did not lead to an increase in underage pregnancies.

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Notes

  1. The Texas law was passed in 1999 but enforced only in 2003. Utah has had a similar restriction in place for a number of years. Joyce et al (2006) discussed the effects of the earlier Texas parental involvement law for abortion, which was enacted in 2000.

  2. We also experimented with including changes to the independent variables in the X matrix. The results are very similar to those reported here.

  3. There are likely still to be some abortions on Texas residents (e.g., those carried out in states without reporting requirements) that are not included in the data.

  4. A potential further source of information on the behavioral response of teenagers in Texas to the parental consent law would have been the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). In principal, YRBSS data on sexual behavior are available biannually for 2001, 2003, 2005, and so on. Unfortunately, YRBSS data for Texas are not available for the key year of 2003, while the data for 2001 used sampling frame that is radically different from that for subsequent surveys, making comparisons over time difficult. See www.dshs.state.tx.us/chs/yrbs/pages/yrbs_faq.shtm for details.

  5. See Blank et al. (2006) for an earlier treatment of the issue of traveling across state borders to obtain abortions.

  6. An alternative specification would be to use the population classified by the AGI as being in need of publicly funded contraception. The results (available from the authors) using this approach are very similar to those reported.

  7. The decrease in clinic attendance by Texas teenagers over the period also contrasts with an increase in the rate of attendance by teenagers in other states in the region. For example, in the rest of Federal Region 6 (Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma), the clinic attendance rate by teenagers increased by 4.8 % over the same period.

  8. Consistent with this, previous work has found that access to family planning clinics is positively associated with adolescent use of more effective forms of contraception, but is not associated with condom use (Bersamin et al. 2011; Grady et al. 1993).

  9. Given that the law was originally passed in 1999, it is possible that some teens may have changed their behavior prior even to 2001, not realizing that the new law had not yet been enforced. In other words, our identification strategy is reliant on the enforcement of the law in 2003 having an additional effect on teen behavior.

  10. The regression results here are robust to the inclusion of preexisting trends in the set of matching variables.

  11. These (and subsequent results) are robust to the use of alternative sets of variables in the probit model. We also investigated the difference-in-difference-in-difference estimator, analyzing the change for U18s (and U16s) relative to the change for 18-year-olds. These estimates also varied in sign and were generally statistically nonsignificant. However, large standard errors mean the tests may be of low power. These results are available from the authors on request.

  12. The results are robust to alternative cutoff points for defining small counties. Note that it is not possible to combine population weights with the propensity score weights.

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Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Janice Jackson, Travis Duke, and Bill Sorenson at the Texas Department of State Health Services for their assistance with county-level data. Thanks are due to Pat Paluzzi of the Healthy Teen Network and Sarah Wheat of Planned Parenthood for helpful observations. We also thank participants at staff seminars at the Universities of Kent, Surrey, Nottingham Trent and Sheffield, at the Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership & Learning at Nottingham University Business School as well as the Editor of the journal and two anonymous referees for many useful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Sir Clive Granger Building, Nottingham University, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Sourafel Girma

  2. Nottingham University Business School, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK

    David Paton

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  1. Sourafel Girma
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  2. David Paton
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Correspondence to David Paton.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Definition and source of variables
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Table 8 County-level summary statistics for 2002
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Girma, S., Paton, D. Does Parental Consent for Birth Control Affect Underage Pregnancy Rates? The Case of Texas. Demography 50, 2105–2128 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0225-1

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