Thursday, February 01, 2007

Lazy fact checking at the RH Reality Check blog

Annie Newman from the RHReality Check blog really needs a lesson in not trusting citeless statistics from a newspaper editorial. She parrots the claim from a Hartford Courant's editorial that "Up to 8 percent of sexually assaulted women in the United States become pregnant with the assailant's child."

8%? Really? According to Planned Parenthood's website, "eight out of 100 women will become pregnant after having unprotected sex once during the second or third week of their cycles." Is that where the Hartford Courant's statistic came from? Not quite the same thing, huh?

It's also amazing how Newman also seemingly can't understand why Catholic hospitals would give an ovulation test to women who have been raped (it's not a "purity-test" as Newman claims) and won't give EC to women who have ovulated. It's because they think EC might prevent an embryo from implanting and if the woman has already ovulated then EC won't stop ovulation and the only theoretical way EC would then work is to prevent the implantation of a human embryo - which they oppose.

I think pro-choice organizations who want Catholic hospitals to distribute EC would be much better off if they pointed to studies which tend to show that EC doesn't have a post-ovulation effect instead of trying to demonize prolifers. But then this would probably also force pro-choice organizations to actually examine a wide range scientific studies relating to EC which would also point to how EC is much less effective than they claim.

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