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Volume Number

53

Issue Number

1

Abstract

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade they effectively took Federally protected reproductive rights and pushed the issue to individual states. In the aftermath the debate has been bitter, partisan, and sometimes violent as both states and the national government have tried to address the question of reproductive rights for women. States took advantage of this policy window to either further restrict or expand access to reproductive healthcare through several conduits including, referenda, legislation or court rulings. Yet, the discussion in the south has largely been one-sided. Except for Virginia, every southern state has been rated as “very restrictive” or “most restrictive” by the Guttmacher Institute. While some of the state actions have been both successful and predictable, in other instances the outcomes of these efforts have been surprising. Our research finds a major gap between legislative action and public opinion. We use a 50-state cross sectional design to examine state policy change in this arena and to develop a model to predict future state actions. Our model includes a series of public opinion, political, socio-demographic predictors on state reproductive rights restrictiveness, and a dummy variable to capture differences in southern states.

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