The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Dobb’s v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has heightened interest in the link between restrictions on abortion access and child maltreatment. Connecting decreased access to abortion to increases in child maltreatment and subsequent foster care entries presents substantive challenges related to the magnitude of any effect of abortion restrictions, methodological challenges related to limitations of existing sources of national child welfare data, and conceptual challenges related to the structure and function of child welfare systems. In this paper, we explore these substantive, methodological and conceptual challenges. Specifically, we consider both the actual impact of abortion restrictions on the occurrence of abortions and the complexities that studying the link between abortion restrictions and child maltreatment presents. We caution researchers about making causal links between abortion restrictions and either child maltreatment or foster care entries without sufficiently documenting limitations of national sources of child welfare data and accounting for multiple confounding factors.

美国最高法院对多布诉杰克逊妇女健康组织一案的裁决引起了人们对堕胎限制与虐待儿童之间联系的兴趣。将堕胎机会的减少与虐待儿童和随后寄养儿童的增加联系起来，提出了与堕胎限制的影响程度相关的实质性挑战、与现有国家儿童福利数据来源的局限性相关的方法学挑战以及与结构相关的概念挑战和儿童福利系统的功能。在本文中，我们探讨了这些实质性、方法论和概念上的挑战。具体来说，我们既考虑了堕胎限制对堕胎发生的实际影响，也考虑了研究堕胎限制与虐待儿童之间的联系所带来的复杂性。我们提醒研究人员，在没有充分记录国家儿童福利数据来源的局限性并考虑多种混杂因素的情况下，不要在堕胎限制与虐待儿童或寄养儿童之间建立因果关系。