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.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Avatar of Mark Tiedemann
    Mark Tiedemann

    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.

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Mark: I haven't read the full report (I haven't invested the $15 necessary to obtain a copy), but Guttmacher also states this:

    This study was based on in-depth interviews with 38 women who obtained abortions in the United States in 2004. These women were a subsample of larger study focused around the reasons for and context in which women are making decisions about abortion.

    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/ind

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