Thanks, MarcoPolo, for the mention of Dr. Edward Green. I wasn’t familiar with his work but I certainly will acquaint myself with it.
There also needs to be some pushback to organizations like the Guttmacher Institute, and I point them out specifically. Do you remember the poll done last year that showed 90% of Catholic women use birth control? Well, that’s not entirely accurate even though that’s what the news media often read at night. Guttmacher actually reported that 90% of
Catholic women between the ages of 18 and 54 who were not trying to get pregnant or who were not currently pregnant had at one point in their lives used birth control. See the difference? It’s not that Guttmacher lied - they stated their results but few reports (or viewers) are savvy enough to tell the difference between “90% of women” and “90% of this data set that does not representatively sample women in the age group”.
Think about the difference - it’s not small, but rather wide-ranging.
- Excluding women who are pregnant = relying upon women who are not trying to get pregnant, which skews more heavily towards those using birth control
- Excluding women trying to get pregnant = excluding women who are DEFINITELY NOT using birth control
Taken together, these exclusions mean that the survey is intentionally undersampling women who do not use birth control currently.
They could have asked “Are you
currently using birth control?” Smaller number, right? The way it was asked includes everyone from the woman who used a condom once with a college boyfriend, then never used birth control with her husband and has a family of 5, to the 40-year-old woman who has been on the Pill since she was 13 and never wants children. These reflect very different attitudes towards birth control and family planning in general. To sum them together into “90%” gives the appearance of a homogenous data set when in reality there isn’t one. Yet this is precisely how the media and supporters of birth control portrayed the results of the survey. I suspect that Guttmacher figured this would happen and, rather than complicate its press release, gave a simple summary, kept the detailed results available, and expected that confirmatory biases would take over.
A confirmatory bias is when you don’t question data that supports your viewpoint. It’s a very hedgehog way of thinking (to reference Tetlock).
I’ve always been interested in the demographics of abortion victims. I suspect that girls are more likely to be aborted than boys, that non-whites are more likely than whites, and that low income are more likely than middle class or better.
I’d suspect this as well, and there’s data to prove it. Freakonomics got in trouble for relating the higher abortion rate among minorities to the higher crime rate among minorities to the decrease in crime concomitant with the increase in abortion. It was a callous story (fewer blacks = less crime), but also probably missed the point. We know that youth crime is more common in weak families, and children born into homes where a parent is unable to care for a child are more likely to exhibit antisocial behavior.
At no point should that be justification for murdering the children via abortion, but rather to help bolster the family and create a better family unit, regardless of family size. Rather, in this situation, a more reasonable explanation is that families under stress that don’t have kids equate to fewer kids who grow up in stressed families. Good society, hardly, it’s a terrible solution to reduce poverty by murdering the poor, but the number of poor isn’t increased that way.
I would also be interested in the age spread of the mothers, their level of education, their marital status, and their religious preferences.
Also helpful, and more to the point for our purposes of assisting ministries that combat abortion and seek to give mothers the option of life for their children, would be to know the reason for the abortion. I think that the Guttmacher Institute doesn’t always have an incentive to differentiate between causes because they are trying to address whether to provide abortion or adoption (a woman seeking to keep the baby wouldn’t necessarily go to Planned Parenthood, or would she?), while various agencies within Catholic Charities are seeking to provide assistance to the mother to prevent the abortion in the first place.
Let me give an example of the difference: one common category for reason for an abortion is that the mother doesn’t have the financial means of taking care of the baby. But I think there’s a difference between a 15-year-old saying this, and a 34-year-old woman with three children already whose husband has been imprisoned. In the case of the latter, financial support may be the main problem, but for a 15-year-old it’s likely more complex - that her boyfriend is keeping distance, her parents are unsupportive, etc. This is an important difference, for example for Our Lady’s Inn, who can approach the 34-year-old with financial help and likely some other assistance, but in the 15-year-old’s case it may be necessary to have intervention with a family counselor who can help the family to come together around the girl.
I have seen “statistics” but not reliable citations. I don’t know if accurate data is even available. But reliable intelligence may help us better understand and combat this scourge.
Accuracy in data collection is part of it, but also interpretation. I don’t even know if we (Catholic Church as an entity) conduct polls around abortion in terms of individual experience. We may end up having to have an outside entity perform the data collection just to keep from biasing the survey results, ie “My priest is asking me” versus “an independent poller working for a research foundation is asking me.”
