Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
A poll commissioned by abortion supporters who are desperate to stop the state of Texas from enforcing safety measures in abortion facilities allegedly found that up to 240,000 Texas women had tried to self-abort due to the lack of access to “reproductive health care”.
Writing for Life News, Brad Mattes, executive director of Life Issues Institute, has found numerous serious problems with a new poll that falsely states a high number of self-abortions being done by women in Texas with the hope of persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against a Texas law that would require the state’s abortion clinics to meet the same safety standards as other ambulatory surgical centers.
For starters, the poll isn’t specific to the time frame of the new law. Instead, pollsters asked just 779 women if they had “ever” tried to do an abortion on themselves.
Texas has almost six million women between the ages of 18 and 49. Based on the answers of just over 750 of them, researchers arrived at the erroneous conclusion that anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women have at one point or another tried to self-abort.
Even more ludicrous is how they asked the questions. For example, researchers asked each woman if she thought her best friend had ever tried to self-abort. Just over one percent said they thought so. Another 2.3 percent said they suspected their best friend or someone else had tried to self-abort.
“Eventually the researchers did ask the women if they themselves had ever tried to abort on their own, and 1.7 percent said they had,” Mattes reports. “That gave the low estimate of 100,000 women. The women’s speculation about other women gave the high estimate of 240,000.”
When we discover the methodology behind the numbers, it’s apparent that the numbers are hardly convincing at best and grossly exaggerated at worst.
But it’s not surprising when we consider who’s behind the poll. It was commissioned by TxPEP (Texas Policy Evaluation Project) which is based at the University of Texas Population Research Center.
As Mattes explains, “The aim of TxPEP is to ‘document and analyze the impact of the measures affecting reproductive health’ passed in 2011 and 2013.”
Others came from Ibis Reproductive Health, where “increasing access to safe abortion” is at the top of the agenda, as is their project to keep late-term abortion legal, called Later Abortion Initiative, Mattes reports.
Some researchers are affiliated with the University of California at San Francisco who published a study in 2013 advocating the allowance of non-doctors to perform surgical abortions and downplaying the high complication rates that they discovered.
“All are published researchers, but they didn’t begin this study with a blank slate; they began with a pro-abortion agenda,” Mattes concludes.
Even though this highly flawed and biased study will make headlines in the mainstream media, Mattes is asking everyone to spread the word as far and wide as possible (especially with Texas lawmakers) so that the public can have access to the truth behind this outrageous piece of pro-abortion propaganda.
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