There aren’t many life events a woman is less likely to discuss with a stranger than abortion.
There aren’t many issues where the major media’s bias is stronger and more uniform than abortion.
Add those two factors together, and you get a factually misleading, seemingly agenda-driven piece from CNN asserting that almost no women feel regret five years after having an abortion.
“The top emotion all the groups of women in the study said they felt at the end of the survey was relief,” CNN reported. “Researchers came to this conclusion after surveying nearly 1,000 women and following up with them 11 times over a period of five years.”
This latter part is grossly misleading. It makes it sound like the researchers followed up with “nearly 1,000 women” for five years. That’s not true.
It turns out nearly 1,000 women, 956 to be precise, participated in the “baseline interview” — that is, the initial interview. About 28% of the women dropped out before the final two years, leaving the final sample on which the long-term conclusions were reached at 667 women.
Author Corinne Rocca, whose career is dedicated to increasing the availability of abortion and contraception, says that there’s no reason to assume those nearly 300 women who dropped out were more likely to regret their abortion than the 667 who stayed on. That’s pretty presumptuous.
If doubts steadily crept into your mind that aborting your child was a mistake, don’t you think you might find yourself less eager over time to participate in interviews about it?
This points to the bigger problem: What are we to think of all the mothers who declined at the very outset to talk to strangers about their abortion? The researchers found the women from an earlier abortion study. And then: “37.5% of eligible women consented to participate, and 85% of those women completed baseline interviews.
That means that out of 3,000 eligible women, this study got consistent interviews with 667. That’s about 22%, and it is likely to include those with the fewest reservations about their abortion.
This is a clear example of selection bias. If 22% of a given population agrees to repeated interviews over five years about their abortions, it seems pretty likely that that 22% felt more positively about their abortions than the 78% who either refused interviews or stopped giving them.
In other words, this study likely selected from mothers like comedienne Michelle Wolf, who had no regrets, and then found that most of them had no regrets. (This study from 2018 discusses the problems of selection bias in these abortion studies.) That’s hardly a convincing conclusion. But it’s good enough for some in our media.
