How to distort skewed social science.

I hate the social scientism, and I am a social scientist. No one digs into the methodology and considers the validity of the studies. I’m looking at a PLOS paper on emotional state after termination of pregnancy. Before I start talking about analysis, I would say, if I was reviewing this, that it is a valuable question to ask — almost all questions are — and doing this stuff is very hard.

But it is making the rounds. As Dalrock points out.

Last month Latest.com ran a story defending abortion with the headline Study: 95 Percent Of Women Feel Relief, Not Sad, After Having Abortions  

One of the many arguments against abortion, especially abortions that take place after the first trimester, is that there are lasting, negative psychological effects for the women who have them. Some anti-abortion groups have gone so far as to say that women who regret terminating their pregnancies are actively being “censored.”

    However a new study, published in Plos ONE, followed almost 700 women who had abortions as well as a group that were denied abortions for three years. The primary focus of the study was to compare the outcomes of women who had early abortions and those who had them later.

    “In crude data, approximately 95% of women completing each follow-up interview reported that having the abortion was the right decision for them…

This is an astounding defense of abortion, and demonstrates an opportunity to punch back much harder.  The argument that abortion is a problem because it makes women sad is foolish.  What we should instead be pointing out is that our embrace of abortion has turned our women into monsters.

95% of women who murder their unborn children (and have them sold for parts) feel good about having done so!  This is what we should be calling out far and wide.  Not only does this call out the profound ugliness of abortion, it will pierce the heretofore shameless.  Women very often appear impervious to shame, but in reality they are terrified of being called out.

Well the paper is open source, and the first thing you should do is look at the methodology. To quote:

Overall, 37.5% of eligible women consented to participate, and 85% of those completed baseline interviews (n = 956). Among the Near-Limit and First-Trimester Abortion groups, 92% completed six-month interviews, and 69% were retained at three years; 93% completed at least one follow-up interview. The final sample size of participants for analyses was 667. Analyses excluded the participants recruited from one site at which all but one Turnaway later obtained an abortion elsewhere, because the site did not meet the intended eligibility criterion for the study. We also excluded two Near-Limit group and one First-Trimester participant who decided not to terminate their pregnancies.

...

Women were also asked at each interview how much they had felt each of six emotions about the abortion (relief, happiness, regret, guilt, sadness, anger) over the last week (0 = not at all, 1 = a little, 2 = moderately, 3 = quite a bit, 4 = extremely). The emotions examined were drawn from the literature [6–8, 12, 18]. We used responses to the four negative emotions to create a scale (range 0–16; Cronbach’s ? = 0.88). Similarly, responses to the two positive emotions were combined into a scale (range 0–8; ? = 0.69). To ensure that women responded about the abortion and not the pregnancy itself, these items were preceded by emotions questions regarding the pregnancy. At each follow-up interview, women were asked how often they thought about the pregnancy or abortion (0 = never, 1 = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3 = fairly often, 4 = all the time).

Well, a 37% response rate worries me: I sweat when I get less than 50% response rate in surveys, and I’ve done surveys bigger than this one. I try to get my response rate above 70%, and even then worry that those who respond are different from those who do not. Which could be the case: about a third of those women who agreed to be in this group are US Black and a quarter are US hispanic: those numbers are much higher than the general population. In addition, a quarter of the women are unemployed. So this group are poorer and more likely to be a member of a minority than a woman in the US. Yes, these tables matter.

It’s worth noting, that half the women considered that abortion had no stigma at all. Or to put it another way, half of these women (who had an abortion, and are probably poorer and less connected to society than the average woman) still consider abortion somewhat wrong despite abortion being a consititional right since 1973, and five decades of feminist propaganda saying abortion is moral and should be part of universal health care .

The second issue is how they defined positive and negative emotions . I’ve had to do a fair bit of scale development. I try to get the internal consistency of my scales above 0.80, preferably 0.9. The negative scale gets there, the positive scale… less so. And the negative emotions remain, while honestly I don’t know how to interpret the positive emotions.

So:

• We have a poor response rate
• We have dubious measures
• We have an odd population, with probable bias

And it is very hard to make conclusions, particularly those in the press. Now, I do not disagree that the use of shame around abortion is legitimate. What Planned Parenthood (USA) is doing — selling fetal parts — is shameful. It is wrong. Shaming those who associate with such is appropriate: praising those women who adopt their children out or have children within the bounds of matrimony is also appropriate.

It is also worthwhile to discuss that proxy measures are not true measures. The true measures are not how you feel, but how you function as a mother, a wife, and the state of your soul. Now, the last you cannot measure, but the others we can: and the state of our society we can observe.

I (pagan belief system) always thought abortion was a complicated issue. Life of the child vs. rights of the mom. Until I started traveling the world, then I realized that a demand for abortion was actually the symptom of a deeper illness within society.

In many countries every child is considered an asset, not a burden. So any mom that doesn’t want her baby will give it to a very happy relative or friend. No lawyers or complicated paperwork involved.

In America, there is both a shortage of adoptable babies and a demand for abortion. Doesn’t this strike anyone as strange? I know a baby in the USA that was barely saved from being aborted, because a lady that was looking to adopt offered the young unwed mom a new car in exchange for the child. The legal argument for the gift was that the young lady needed transportation to get to the hospital, so it was considered a legitimate medical expense. It shouldn’t take a bribe to motivate someone to deal with a bunch of paperwork (this is even hinted at in the movie “Juno”, although our heroine turns down the offer of “extra compensation”).

The christian community has also increased the demand for abortion through two methods. The first is by ostracizing unwed moms, like the girl that kicked out of my high school for being pregnant. The second is by preventing sex education in high school, even though sex education has been shown to decrease unwanted pregnancies.

This pagan commentator forgets that it is not merely avoiding pregnancy and the mechanics that matter in sex education. It is that your heart breaks when sexual relationships end, and if that has happened enough time there is rubble.

Much, much better is to, as a society, choose to make every pregnancy wanted: if not by the woman who has made foolish choices then by her sister who desperately wants to raise a child, love a child, regardless of genome.