By Erich Vieth on January 18th, 2008
What kind of women are having abortions?
Mike the Mad Biologist reports on a new report by the Guttmacher Institute. He concludes:
61% of women who have abortions already have children. So much for the ‘irresponsible slut’ propaganda.
- The end game of banning abortion, by the statistics
- How shall we punish women who commit murder by having abortions?
- Doctors who perform abortions, etc
- Those abstinence-only programs are really bringing down the teen pregnancy rate . . . or are they?
- The effect of media images of sexed-up girls and women posing as adolescents
Not to dispute the findings of the Gutmacher Institute–I tend to agree with most of their conclusions–but I have trouble with claims that seek to extrapolate to the population at large based on sucdh a small sample. They interview 38 women.
Part of my skepticism of such stats comes from the nagging suspicious that the kinds of people who answer to polls like this are largely self-selected. The sort of person who would agree to this study are precisely the sort of people who would fall into the category thus determined.
It’s like studies about the consequences of bad childhoods—by and large, the only people who answer the studies are those whose lives have been wrecked as a result of abuse or neglect on the part of the parents. The surveyors even seek them out. We rarely hear from the “survivors” who actually manage to live good lives despite the rotten childhood.
I tend to see these studies as subsequently lopsided and somewhat unreliable, even when they confirm something I strongly suspect it true. 38 test cases just doesn’t seem suffieient to make such a broad claim. 3800 would be a lot more convincing.
Mark: I haven’t read the full report (I haven’t invested the $15 necessary to obtain a copy), but Guttmacher also states this:
I don’t know how much larger that larger study was. I do know that Guttmacher is well-respected for doing its research properly.
See http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2008/01/07/index.html