WASHINGTON, May 31, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) has published a new report which demonstrates that, contrary to several claims made in the last year, abortion rates in the US have continued their decline under the Bush administration. The AGI was founded in honour of a former Planned Parenthood president and therefore has no personal interest in proving Bush’s pro-life policies to be successful.
Pro-abortion or anti-Bush politicians and activists have made a practice over the last several years of criticizing Bush’s pro-life stance by ‘demonstrating’ that his pro-life policies have backfired. They claim that rather than continuing the downward trend of the last two decades, Bush’s policies have caused the abortion rates to increase.
In the most audacious incident yet of this tactic Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, in an appearance a few days ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, said “You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was President?” John Kerry and Hilary Clinton, amongst others, have stated figures to the same effect.
Were it true, anything even approaching a 25% increase would be a catastrophic blow to Bush’s policies, especially taking into account the steady downward trend in abortion rates since 1980. However, the AGI’s analysis of the abortion data available for the 43 most reliable states proves that this statistic is thoroughly, even maliciously, false.
FactCheck.org, a University of Pennsylvania based, non-profit organization whose self-professed goal is to “reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics” has asked how this false statistic came to be circulated. They have traced its source to several opinion pieces by Glen Harold Stassen, printed in the Houston Chronicle and Sojourners, a Christian publication. In these articles Stassen claimed to have satisfactory statistical evidence to show that abortion rates were demonstrating a trend of increasing since Bush’s election into office, and he called this trend ‘disturbing’.
However, Stassen’s research was flawed. His analysis had encompassed suspect data from a mere 16 states, several of which have unreliable abortion reporting methods. In fact, a portion of the data which Stassen cites out of national context in his original opinion piece was gathered from the AGI, the same institute which is currently contradicting his ‘findings’. In a recent memo about the issue Stassen himself has admitted, regarding the AGI report, that “their results are significantly better than what I could have obtained seven months ago. I affirm their methods and their study, and am grateful for their effort.”
What the AGI report shows is that, rather than increasing by so unthinkable a number as the 25% stated by Howard Dean, under Bush the abortion rates have continued their two-decade long decrease. Between 2001 and 2002 the AGI estimates a decrease of .9% in the abortion rate.
JJ