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Measuring abortion.

Article Excerpt
SEX and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy and the Economics of Fertility [dagger] is a model of contemporary social science discourse, revealing in one book both how the enterprise should be conducted and its vulnerability to tunnel vision on the big issues.

Phillip B. Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College, sets out in Sex and Consequences to explore the thesis that the role of abortion is akin to the role of insurance. Legal abortion provides protection from a risk (having an unwanted child), just as auto insurance provides financial protection against the risk of an accident. Legalizing abortion has a main effect of reducing unwanted births, just as auto insurance has a main effect of reducing individuals' losses from auto accidents.

But abortion faces the same problems of moral hazard as other kinds of insurance. Just as a driver with complete insurance may be more likely to have an accident, a woman who has completely free access to abortion may be more likely to have an accidental pregnancy. Levine hypothesizes that legislated restrictions on abortion might serve the same purpose as deductibles do on auto insurance--they alter behavior without having much effect on net outcomes. Thus a state with some restrictions on abortion may have no more unwanted births than a state without restrictions, even though the number of abortions is smaller in the...

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