New study: between 5% and 64% of women regret their abortion

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 8:09 am by Jane the Actuary

New study: between 5% and 64% of women regret their abortion 2016-01-22T08:09:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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OK, that’s not the claim in the actual study.

The study itself, “Decision Rightness and Emotional Responses to Abortion in the United States: A Longitudinal Study” as linked to by Time magazine, among others, says that

approximately 95% of women completing each follow-up interview reported that having the abortion was the right decision for them

and this is the figure that’s being cited, repeatedly, in the media.

But the data? Women were recruited, at some point during the abortion process, were told that if they participated, they’d have semi-annual interviews for three years, and they’d be paid with $50 gift cards for each interview. In all, 37.5% of the women they approached agreed to participate, and only 69% stayed with the study for all three years.

This is a red flag.

Yes, of course, in any such study, it can be difficult to get participants. How many times to you stay on the line when the pollster calls, or click that “yes, I’ll give feedback”? But in any such study, you have to ask whether study participants are different than those who declined to participate, when it comes to the essential questions the study aims to answer.

This was the case with the so-called ‘1 in 5″ sexual assault study, where it’s highly likely that women who were sexually assaulted would want to participate in an anonymous study that they were told would increase awareness of the problem.

And in this case: well, imagine you’re getting an abortion, but you’re not happy about it. You feel forced into it by the father, or by your parents, or you feel you don’t have anywhere else to turn. I could well imagine that you’d want to run far, far away, not say, “sure, I’ll talk to an interviewer next week, and five more times over the next 3 years.”

So all we can really say is this: somewhere between 5% and, oh, say 64.375% (that’s 62.5% + 5% of 37.5%) of women regret their abortion. Which is a different story altogether.

(And — a side note: here’s a piece of Orwellian terminology. The father of the child? Well, he’s not, actually. He’s the “man involved in the pregnancy,” or the MIP. Ugh.)

(Another side note: the study examined women having late-term “near-limit” abortions and compared them to women with first trimester abortions. They asked about possible reasons: 43.6% of the near-limit abortions, compared to 35% of the first trimester abortions, were due, according to the woman, to financial reasons; another 34.8% (vs. 38.6) were because it was “not the right time,” meaning that at most 21.6% — and likely much fewer, or they’d have shown that as a third major category of reason — were due to the serious medical reasons/fetal deformity that’s generally claimed to be the reason for all late-term abortion.)

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