BIASED STUDY FROM PP
Culture & Cosmos
May 3, 2006
Volume 3, Number 39
New Report from Guttmacher Adds Little to Abortion Debate
Officials from the Guttmacher Institute are claiming their new report on
abortion uses the latest data to show how "three decades of legal abortion
have brought broad benefits to women" but pro-life advocates who have
reviewed the report say it is full of rehashed statistics and recycled
arguments.
According to Rebecca Wind, a spokesperson for the Guttmacher Institute, the
report also "debunks false claims about the harmful effects of abortion on
physical and psychological health." Yet the report contains no systematic
debunking of any research and ignores notable studies.
The Guttmacher Institute is the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the nation's
largest abortion provider. Cathy Cleaver Ruse, Senior Fellow for Legal Studies
at the Family Research Council, says that the report contains the same claims
that have been made by the pro-abortion side for years. The report, she said, is
largely based on the same data and the same research they have long referenced.
"The pro-life movement must be experiencing significant success for the
Guttmacher Institute to create an entirely new document to spin its own old
data," she said. "Clearly the voices of post-abortive women and
campaigns like Women Deserve Better are having an effect on the debate."
In its section on the long-term safety of abortion, the report aims to debunk
all scientific claims that abortion harms the health of women. It cites studies
that back up its claims that abortion does not impair infertility, cause breast
cancer, or cause depression and other mental illnesses. Other studies that
contradict those findings are all summarily dismissed in the report as
methodologically flawed.
In addressing whether or not a link between abortion and breast cancer exists
the report asserts, "Abortion opponents seized upon a 1996 analysis, which
combined the results of multiple studies and reported that women who had had an
abortion had a significantly elevated risk of breast cancer. Other researchers
and medical groups, however, found this study to be flawed, largely because the
data were collected only after breast cancer had been diagnosed." But Dr.
Joel Brind, the author of the 1996 study, told Culture & Cosmos that
Guttmacher has it wrong. "In fact, the Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists in the UK, said, in their clinical guideline for abortion
practitioners: 'The Brind paper had no major methodological shortcomings and
could not be disregarded,'" Brind said.
The report also asserts, "Each time the question of the psychological
impact of abortion has been extensively examined . . . leading experts have
concluded that there is no evidence to support a connection" between
abortion and mental illness. It further asserts that, "Well-designed
studies . . . continue to find no causal relationship between abortion and
mental health problems." But the report makes absolutely no mention of a
recent study out of New Zealand that examined a group of 500 girls from birth to
age 25. The study, authored by a pro-choice atheist, found a definitive link
between abortion and depression even after accounting for previous mental
illnesses and other environmental factors.
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