A hell of a correction from the AP:
LONDON (AP) — In an Oct. 11 story about a study examining global abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, The Associated Press erroneously reported that nine out of 10 women will have an abortion before age 45. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and the World Health Organization calculated that an average woman would have 0.9 abortions in her reproductive lifetime (between the ages of 15 and 44), given currently prevailing rates. The figure was arrived at by combining higher abortion rates in some areas and lower abortion rates in others; some women have multiple abortions and others have none. The rate is an average and it does not mean that nine out of 10 women worldwide have abortions.
If half of women have two, and half have zero...
Was there a frequency diagram? For example, what percentage of women had zero, what percentage had one, what percentage had two......
Also, to mess up that description as a journalist doesn't say much that is flattering about him/her.
“We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation.”
“Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes…”
“We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”
– Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, founder of La Raza
"Around the year 2040, whites will become a minority in the United States and, believe me, it will be 'payback time'."
- Pro-Immigration Activist, Jorge Sanchez
“And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.”
- African Studies professor, Dr. Kamau Kambon
"Blond hair and blue eyes are a biological defect."
"The white race is a disease, and the only cure is a bullet. The rule of whites is history. Soon they will be our serfs. It's now the Age of the Brown Man."
- Hindu nationalist, Ramesh Sharma
“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Make no mistake about it we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed–not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed."
- Jewish studies professor, Dr Noel Ignatiev
.
In other related news, Dot-Dubya, crazy people are responsible for the majority of the world's crazy talk. What does that selection of quotes have to do with MM's topic?
don't try to confuse the issue with common sense
Somebody at the AP flunked Statistics 101.
In case anybody wanted to know the relevance of the apparently off-topic series of quotes above, there's a theory among people on the wrong side of the right wing that raising the percentage of foreign-born population in an area will raise the abortion rate in that area. (There appears to be a positive correlation but there's also a negative correlation between UFO sightings and abortion rates. I suppose the saucer people must be pro-life.) In accordance with that, semi-professional paranoids believe that the immigration activists are raising abortion rates in areas with lots of immigrants in order to kill off the white race.
For some reason, they don't mention that non-whites have an even higher abortion rate than whites and they also don't mention that the Noel Ignatiev quoted above is anti-Zionist.
The distribution's an interesting question. Although the correction is obviously embarrassing, a mean of 0.9 abortions per woman could easily mean that about 4 or 5 women in 10 have an abortion at some point. I have to say that's a lot higher than I (as a man) would have naively thought. Did they publish the actual figure, Megan?b
It looks like the AP is keeping up their current 0.9% accuracy rate.
Math is hard. Let's go shopping.
All this says is that there's some noble woman out there getting hundreds of abortions to take one for the team and get the numbers up. I salute you, uterine warrior!
This is like that guy who gets mugged every 11 seconds in New York, right?
EI
William,
That's over the course of 30 years of reproductive life.
Amy P,
.9 per woman is still a pretty large number. In a sense though, it's largely meaningless. The real meat is in the country by country data: nations like Russia use abortion as a primary means of birth control, while others, like Saudi Arabia have an (official) abortion rate of 0. The worldwide figure only obscures these distinctions in its quest for a good news hook.
It's not surprising that the AP missed this
though, given that they can't tell the difference between expected value and incidence rate. (How do you report on anything , much less a complicated population study, without understanding probability at even this basic a level. We're not exactly talking about a difficult distinction here.)
A bit of clarification:
Based on data at the Guttmacher Institute (WHO sponsored)
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.html
There were 29 abortions per 1000 women in 2003 worldwide. My back of the envelope calculation (assuming complete randomness and no more than 1 abortion per woman per year) gives a very, very rough estimate that 41% of women would have an abortion in their lifetime at 2003 rates. (1 - .029)^30 = .4135 This is probably a gross overestimation, but it at least gives a ballpark figure. If anyone finds a better estimate (shouldn't be hard) please post that instead.
Jack at 9:08 might have a point. After figuring the correct math, one also has to wonder which women are distorting the average by having more than their fair share.
It's a good thing that the average number of abortions per woman isn't 1.1. AP would have claimed all women and 10% of the men have an abortion.
Does that mean that 9 out of 10 pregnancies are aborted?
Actually, that wouldn't take into account the number of actual pregnancies there are.
OK, Dave, now that was funny. I'm still wiping soda off my screen.
The things you miss by not having a TV.
I just lost it reading Earnest Iconoclast's post, thoroughly and loudly enough that I had to cover my mouth with a pillow to keep from waking the neighbors.
According to Planned Parenthood, the chances that someone in the US will have an abortion by age 45 is approximately 1 in 3.
Heedless, I'm shocked at how close you are. I would have expected that people willing to have abortions would have had significantly more, and that there would be a lot of people who absolutely refused to even entertain the idea. Instead, the distribution is very close (0.41 vs about 0.34 or 0.35) to what you would expect if they were, in essence, randomly distributed... almost as if people actually got abortions only when they really needed them, and when they needed them, they got abortions, even if they were dead set against them.
Oh... right. They do.
-fred
Instead, the distribution is very close (0.41 vs about 0.34 or 0.35) to what you would expect if they were, in essence, randomly distributed...
I am not certain what the numbers you present refer to - it doesn't look like an R^2-style correlation coefficient. Could you tell me what these numbers refer to? I am not denying your point, I just do not understand the quantification.
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