Fetal Policies, Aid to Children Studied

States with the strongest anti-abortion laws generally are among those that spend less on needy children and are less likely to criminalize the battering or killing of fetuses in pregnant women by a third party, according to a new study.

The survey, the first of its kind to examine the relationship between states’ abortion laws and their spending on at-risk children, says that states with strong anti-abortion laws provide less funding per child for foster care, stipends for parents who adopt children with special needs and payments for poor women with dependent children than do states with strong abortion rights laws.

“As you move from the strongest pro-choice states to the strongest pro-life states, the amount of spending in these areas becomes increasingly lower,” said Jean Schroedel, an associate professor of political science at the Claremont Graduate University in California.

“To put it simply, pro-life states make it difficult for women to have abortions, but they do not help these women provide for the children once born,” Schroedel said.

Her findings are contained in a book, “Is the Fetus a Person: A Comparison of Fetal Policies Across the 50 States,” to be published in June by Cornell University Press.

She said that for the nearly eight years that she researched the issue, she was not an abortion rights activist or affiliated with any abortion rights movement. But she said that in the last six months, after she sent her manuscript to the publisher, she joined Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and “sent off some money--that’s it.”

“When I started this research, I really thought I’d find evidence of how pro-life states were respecting the lives of children and there would be some nice area of common ground where both sides could come together,” Schroedel said. “But I became convinced by my own research and joined these two groups.”

A spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee in Washington said officials there had not seen Schroedel’s report and would not comment on its conclusions.

Schroedel said she analyzed all of the states’ abortion laws as of January 1998 and assigned points ranging from 0 to 24, with the most restrictive at the lower end. She then collected data measuring a wide range of variables, including state aid to needy children; support for women’s rights; indicators of women’s economic, social and political status; levels of prenatal care; and state protection of fetal life.

She said she was surprised to find that many states that restrict abortions the most and spend the least on children are in the Midwest. The states with the strongest anti-abortion laws include Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin.