Hi Neal,

I recently had to deal with this myself.  In the end I went a slightly different direction so I didn't construct a dataset, but I have some ideas about how you could do so.  NARAL documents the laws that each state has on the books (http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/government-and-you/state-governments/) and if you click through to a state and then click on a policy, it will tell you when they passed it.  So you could use this to figure out what policies were in place in what years.  What you won't know is if there was a law that has since been repealed.

Another possibility is to look at back issues of NARAL's "Who Decides" report.  The reports feature tables similar to the Guttmacher ones that will tell you what a state has in place in each year.  NARAL was nice enough to digitize them for me for the years 2000 to 2008 and I'd be happy to share but you'd have to give me a dropbox address or something as they are quite large (about 160MB).  It's possible you could get other years if you ask - I only needed 2000-2008.  I don't know how far back the reports go.

I didn't realize Guttmacher had the older data but they were very helpful when I needed something else so you may very well get what you need from them.

Austin Clemens
Ph.D Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Georgia
austincl.myweb.uga.edu/<http://austincl.myweb.uga.edu/>

On Jan 26, 2013, at 2:55 PM, Neal Caren <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
 wrote:

Hi,

Does anyone know of a dataset that has the number and/or type of abortion
restrictions that were passed in each state by year, 1985-2012ish?

On their website, the Guttmacher Institute has great state-level data
tables in PDFs going back about seven years, but has figures with
aggregated state data that go back another twenty years. It would be great
to have this earlier data at the state level. I have contacted the good
people at Guttmacher, but have not heard back yet.

Any other leads would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Neal

--
Neal Caren
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Book Review Editor, Social Forces
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
email <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> web <http://nealcaren.web.unc.edu>
twitter<http://twitter.com/HaphazardSoc>
scholar <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cy0u16kAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao>

**********************************************************
            Political Methodology E-Mail List
  Editors: Ethan Porter        <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
           Gregory Whitfield   <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
**********************************************************
       Send messages to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
 To join the list, cancel your subscription, or modify
          your subscription settings visit:

         http://polmeth.wustl.edu/polmeth.php

**********************************************************



**********************************************************
             Political Methodology E-Mail List
   Editors: Ethan Porter        <[log in to unmask]>
            Gregory Whitfield   <[log in to unmask]>
**********************************************************
        Send messages to [log in to unmask]
  To join the list, cancel your subscription, or modify
           your subscription settings visit:

          http://polmeth.wustl.edu/polmeth.php

**********************************************************