Pro-life laws do not harm public health

This week, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) and IBIS Reproductive Health released a study on pro-life laws and public-health outcomes.  It purports to show that the states most active in enacting pro-life policies fare poorly on a range of public-health metrics.

Specifically, it claims the states that have enacted the most pieces of pro-life legislation score worse on separate metrics designed to measure both women’s and children’s overall health. This is the latest in a long line of studies attempting to show that pro-life laws adversely affect public-health outcomes. It has received sympathetic coverage from a number of media outlets including Mother Jones and HuffPost.

In reality, the CRR-IBIS study suffers from two significant methodological problems. First, this study analyzes just one year of data. As a result, it provides no evidence of how changes in pro-life policy affect various metrics of public health over time. 

Read more at National Review