The Obama campaign really has no shame. They're attacking Mitt Romney for not wanting to waste his time talking about Representative Akin's comments and fulfilling the media's and the Democratic party's dream of it lasting another week in the news. This attack from a campaign which doesn't allow reporters to interview campaign surrogates unless the give them veto power over their quotes.
Rebecca Rosen badly garbles abortions in America pre-Roe at the Atlantic. This paragraph is embarrassing. Where are the editors?
Of course no official statistics were kept, but Reagan cites some late-19th-century doctors as estimating a rate of about two million abortions per year. Studies confirmed their prevalence: One, of some 10,000 working-class women who visited birth-control clinics in the late 1920s, found that 10 to 23 percent had had abortions. A smaller study at a clinic in the Bronx in the early 1930s found that 35 percent of women -- Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike -- had had at least one abortion. And of course, because abortion occurred mostly on the black market, they were very dangerous: One estimate placed the annual death toll at 5,000 women.2 million abortions a year in the late 19th century? That abortion rate would be astronomical. The census bureau estimates there were only around 76 million people in the U.S. in 1900. So approximately 1/4 as many people were having nearly twice as many abortion as today? Back when abortions were illegal? If Leslie Reagan thinks 2 million annual abortion is a good estimate of late-19th-century United States, then maybe you shouldn't believe a word she says because she's clearly not competent.
Rosen then provides some other numbers for women who said they had abortions but does nothing to show how those unnamed studies would prove anywhere near 2 million annual abortions especially since the percent of women who supposedly admitted to having had abortions in one of the studies is lower than the number (1/3) touted by abortion advocates today.
Lastly, she doesn't mention that the annual death estimate of 5,000 has been debunked for decades.
How do these people find writing jobs?
Posts
The estimate of the number of abortions -- from waht I'm reading -- is extrapolated from the abortion rate among users of a birth control clinic. Can we really assume that the rest of the country was aborting at the same rate?
ReplyDelete