I’m Diane with save the storks. When we attend conferences and churches time and time again, we have women and men come up to us sharing.
Their abortion. So the organization that this woman represents, save the storks, makes a lot of very questionable claims about Abor. I want to take a quick look at these four right here, ask whether these are in fact, real numbers or just more imaginary ones that were researched at, Trust Me Bro University. Because women too can do their own research, but they actually start really strong. Most sources will tell you somewhere in the neighborhood of 23 to 25% of women aged 45 and under in the United States had an abortion. Gutmacher Institute’s most recent estimate is 24.7%. So far so good.
Unfortunately, that’s the only thing they get right. It’s claimed that 44% of women regret their decision to have an abortion. That number comes from the website of the Sera Pregnancy Center. And I use Pregnancy Center very loosely because Sierra is one of those pro lifter fronts that will actively push disinformation on vulnerable women in order to convince them not to abort.
And they cherry picked this stat from a 30 year old qualitative study of only 45 women who were all from the same Protestant congregation in Florida and had been asked to write about their abortion experience by their pastor. There might be just like a small selection bias at work here.
We’re no doubt wondering then, well, what is the actual regret rate? And this has been studied many times. The data is remarkably easy to find, and the regret rate is usually somewhere below 10%. Now that said, these studies do have limitations, which is that the response rate is typically quite low. So you’ll get studies that show only 1% of respondents regret having an abortion, but only one third of the people they contacted actually responded. In any case, though, we have no reason to think that the regret right is somewhere around 50%. So what about the two thirds of women who felt pressured into getting an abortion? While you would probably not be surprised to learn that our source here is yet another one of these anti abortion pregnancy centers who are similarly drawing on old research with a small sample, this one about 200. A closer look at the data gives us very good reason to be skeptical of just how applicable it is to the general population. Half of the women in sample think that abortion is morally wrong. Only 40% believe that women actually have a right to abortion. And what makes this even more ridiculous is that the authors of the studies themselves say nobody should be using this data to generalize about the United States as a whole. It’s a shame that they watched this one so badly because like this is actually an area of concern.
Many women report feeling pressured to choose abortion even though they don’t want to. And the authors of this particular study list at least 10 different kinds of pressures from your partner, your family, but also your workplace, just general financial pressure, none of which I would add here is going to be solved by receiving counseling at an anti abortion pregnancy center no matter how good they are, but regardless of how poorly this save the Stork’s website reported it. This is a very real area of concern because the greater those external pressures to choose abortion are on a woman, particularly, though not exclusively, if she would have chosen to keep the fetus, the more negative her react emotions and experiences and emotions following the abortion are likely to be. I feel like this is obvious, but I’m going to say it anyway. None of those external pressures disappear if access to abortion disappears. These may be people who don’t want to choose abortion, but in many, if not most, if not all cases, these are people who feel they need it. Lastly, we have this 84% who did not feel fully informed of their decision, which honestly is unsurprising because two thirds never received any counseling in the first place. So Diana, I’m very comfortable awarding you and your organization and f here. You did your own research, but as with most people who do, you did it badly.