By Steve Jalsevac
FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, May 5, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In its weekly briefing today the Virginia based Population Research Institute slams the credibility of the Planned Parenthood Guttmacher Institute’s latest report. PRI says the report, “Abortion in Women’s Lives”, “has holes so big and assertions so far from being scientific that its authors should be ashamed”.
PRI’s Joseph D’Agostino indicates that the report reflects the current desperation of the abortion lobby over the impending, eventual demise of the infamous Roe decision.
The statistics used in the report are seen to be gross exaggerations to bolster Planned Parenthood’s claims for the need for unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion.
PRI says the study “uses the common statistical chicanery of grossly exaggerating the number of abortions taking place in the United States before Roe. ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, it is estimated that 200,000 to 1.2 million women each year had illegal abortions in the United States, many of which were under unsafe conditions,’ it says. ‘According to another estimate, which extrapolated data from North Carolina, 699,000 illegal abortions occurred nationwide in 1955 and 829,000 illegal procedures were performed in 1967.’
However, Ramesh Ponnuru is quoted by PRI as responding, “The upper end of that estimate isn't remotely plausible. The number of reported abortions in 1974, when Roe had made them all legal, was 899,000. The number in 1975 was 1 million. Are we really supposed to believe that the number of abortions fell when abortion became legal? (And then immediately started to climb for a decade and a half?)”
D’Agostino addresses additional aspects of the report revealing it is far more of a propaganda exercise than a legitimate scientific study of the relationship of abortion to women’s lives in today’s world.
See the complete PRI analysis
Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute Getting Desperate
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/may/060505a.html
