State Abortion Legislation as a Public Good--Before and after Roe v. Wade.

This paper develops a theoretical model of the public demand for abortion legislation, taking account of two possible types of demand, external and private. All voters possess an external demand for abortion legislation whereas only those voters who could potentially have an abortion possess a private demand. The authors estimate the public demand for abortion legislation using state-level data prior to Roe v. Wade and then predict the likely outcome for each state should Roe be overturned. Their predictions suggest that the country as a whole is unlikely to return to as restrictive an environment as existed pre-Roe. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.