In case anyone (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) wanted my thoughts on this piece:
- Where abortion rates are falling–hurray! I (and many others, too) celebrate this. This is what we want.
- It’s very hard to know in Canada what the abortion rate is doing. This is because we do not force compliance on submitting numbers from private clinics. So chunks of data are missing.
- In the world, it is harder still to know what the abortion rate is doing. In countries where abortion is illegal, they are obviously not collecting the stats. They use, as stated in the article, modeling and extrapolation, published, and, wait for it, unpublished studies (what is that?)
“The study was based on statistical modeling of information collected from national surveys, official government statistics and other published and unpublished studies and was funded by various countries as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the United Nations.” - Back when I looked at this more closely, they were taking the abortion rate in the one town where they knew what it was and extrapolating further… so it would be like taking the abortion rate in Orillia and saying that applies to the province of Ontario. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. We can’t say.
- I am hereby concluding my cursory thoughts on abortion stats worldwide. I don’t know much–willing to learn more and be corrected. But whenever the A word comes up it comes with a lot of baggage and ideology that people (yes, pro-lifers too) cling to. So it is wise to view data, science and research on this topic with a salt mine of salt.
This is the Wieliczka salt mine, a World Unesco Heritage site in Poland. Each crystal in the chandelier is salt. They carved a chapel down there, and some people get married there. Crazy. Anyway, this is how much salt you need to take abortion stats with.
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