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November 27, 2012 - Seriously, have you tried talking on the phone and blowing your nose at the same time? It's not easy, and yet we overhear phone conversations with people doing it on tv all the time (yet the nose-blowing is always while we're seeing whom they're talking to, not them).
Anyway, I am on vacation, but I found this article that highlights a lot of the misreporting of abortion statistics and found it worthy of discussion. I'm not disputing any of the data collected during the study, and for the most part I'm not disputing any of its findings as most conclusions were deemed inconclusive. What I am disputing is how relevant and informative the study is. All these numbers are based on a metric of per 1000 pregnancies. This metric thus assumes that the number of pregnancies is constant which I highly doubt is the case. So though the abortion rate may be dropping, so too may be the pregnancy rate and the number of abortions may be declining at a much slower rate or the pregnancy rate could be rising and with it the number of abortions but the rate is skewed by the influx of pregnancies.
Take for example this hypothetical example where one year there are only 1000 pregnancies and they're all aborted. Of course this example is total nonsense, but the abortion rate here becomes 100%. A year later 100,000 women get pregnant, and again 1,000 abort. Suddenly there are still the same number of abortions, but because of an increased number of pregnancies the abortion rate has plummetted to 1%. Or one year there's 2,000 pregnancies and 1,000 abort for a 50% abortion rate and the next year there's 1,500 pregnancies and 1,000 abort for an increase to an abortion rate of 66.7%. None of these examples showed any change in the number of abortions, just the number of pregnancies which impacted the abortion rate.
My reading of this data by "scientifically" holding a ruler to the end points of each line, show that yes, the abortion rate is declining, but the number of abortions is declining much more rapidly than the abortion rate which seemingly indicates that less pregnancies are occuring (likely less unplanned prgancies and thus fewer abortions) rather than a decline in abortion numbers while pregnancy numbers remain constant. But without any numbers regarding pregnancy alongside abortion rate numbers makes me uncertain. And overall the data collection is completely ridiculous and irresponsible.
I'm not saying abortion rates can't be a useful statistic but in order to be useful, they must be presented alongside other relevant data that may indicate possible causes for change which this study, and many like it, seems to completely neglect. Simply put I don't know what's going on with abortion numbers from this study as it doesn't collect adequate data to give any insight.
-D
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