You demonstrate why people don’t trust statistics. Namely, that they are so frequently abused.
I do stats work for a living. People don’t trust statistics because they’re hard to abuse when access to the data is provided. Thus your trouble.
You are doing three very, very dishonest things.
What, like breaking the 8th Commandment (again)?
First, you are using total abortions. But this metric does not really tell us much, because demographics are not constant.
Guttmacher Institute uses total abortions, NRLC uses total abortions, I used total abortions.
If every abortion is a tragedy, as you said above, then everyone should be counted, shouldn’t it?
The total population size has changed, as well as our age distribution.
The Baby Boomers leaving childbearing age would dramatically drop the number of abortions all things being equal because there are so many more of them than Gen X and Gen Y.
Statistics for number of Americans of childbearing age (loosely 18-49) are easily obtainable—go do the math.
The two metrics normally used in honest discussions about abortion rates are the “abortion rate” (% of child bearing age women having abortions) and the “birth rate” (% of child bearing age women having babies).
Well, there goes that honesty again. Funny, but I graduated from a service academy, and our definition of honesty was “I will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.”
But in the herky-jerky funhouse mirror of morality AC-style, a Catholic who supports abortion is moral while a Catholic who votes Republican is not.
As for the rate, the dishonest application of such normalization is when undertaken to minimize the magnitude of things.
For example, were I dishonest and talking about plane crashes on my lousy airline, I’d do it in terms of crashes per hours flown. Why? Because it’s a more abstract number.
The more honest approach is “10 crashes in the last two months.”
The difference is in the catastrophic nature of even one crash.
Or even one abortion.
Your approach would allow the Khmer Rouge to emphasize the relatively low number of Cambodians slaughtered daily—hey, only a small percent of Cambodia’s total population took the bullet in the rice paddy today!
But your goal is ever to minimize abortion, isn’t it?
These two figures, in relationship to each other, give us our best picture of actual abortion prevalence.
No, those two figures are an attempt to hide an ugly reality in statistical abstraction.
And when you do the math — if you do it — you won’t be able to wish away 1973-1977.
As I have already noted, the problem with studying abortion rates is that they appear to put your political reasoning in serious question. Abortion rates have declined for several decades, but declined fastest under the Clinton Presidency. The rates have continued to decline under Bush, but at a slower rate. In a few states, the rates have actually reversed.
The decline started under Bush I and has gone right on to the present. But you apparently have recanted on your notion that they rose under Bush II.
And as anyone with a passing knowledge of stats know, this is represented in the phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”.
The mean # abortions for 1973-1989 (just before the 1990 peak) is 1,401,024 dead babies. The standard deviation is 271,896 dead babies. So the question statistians would ask is “How low would abortions have to be before we could rule out normal variation with a 95% level of confidence?” The answer is 1,401,024 - (3*271896) = 585,338 dead babies.
We are currently at 1.3 MM.
Normal variation.
Now, you can try to build a regression model putting in your favorite Obama policies and predicting the number of abortions, but it will have to drop to 585,338 before you can say with confidence that those policies have improved the situation.
You called this ‘lies’ and pointed me to the Guttmacher Institute, but that data says the same thing, as does the CDC’s legal abortion survey program. You really don’t want to use the Guttmacher data to bolster your position, because the WHO study they did concluded that legal status plays only a very small role in abortion rates, and the role is shrinking because of the growing availability of chemical abortificants.
Yes, the claim that abortions rose under Bush is a lie.
I use data which cannot be claimed to be favorable to my position. It’s the honest thing to do. Try it.
This does not matter to me, because my position is that morality and expediency are two different issues, but you are trying to assert morality via statistical evidence.
And there you go making claims about what I try to do. I told you what I did—I debunked your bogus claims, for which you continue to provide either no evidence or evidence which contradicts your claims.
