Last week, we highlighted Willis Krumholz’s Federalist guide detailing exactly how the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute appears to have actually dropped a 1994 data point from its contents on unintended pregnancy rates to obscure Planned Parenthood’s role in driving them up in the mid-1990s and falsely suggest its promotion of intrauterine machines was crucial to driving them spine down.
Guttmacher spokesman Joerg Dreweke replied, claiming the data point was flawed, and removed to much more accurately reflect the real rates. Now, Krumholz has actually answered the charge, defending his job and keeping that Guttmacher still has actually some explaining to do.
While conceding the explanation deserved a mention in his original piece, Krumholz initial notes an obvious necessity why Dreweke’s cries of victimization are overblown:
I had no intention to forgo Guttmacher’s adverse of the story, having offered Guttmacher public relations employees nearly two weeks, full of repeated phone calls, to comment prior to the release of the article. They failed to do so.
Indeed. If the matter truly was as straightforward as that, there’s no necessity Guttmacher wouldn’t have actually offered it to one of several media inquiries from the start, thereby preventing unnecessary unsatisfactory press.
Why didn’t they? Perhaps due to the fact that they’re exaggerating the significance of their defense. The data point was allegedly omitted due to the fact that Focus for Illness Regulate statisticians were concerned concerning the source survey—the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth—suffering from a programming error that caused “a smaller-than-expected percentage of respondents to receive one of the questions leading to the question that captures whether the pregnancy was unwanted.”
However, Krumholz goes on to detail exactly how various other NSFG studies contain outliers too, yet “Guttmacher has actually begun to go with which studies to usage and which to ignore, which merely happens to reinforce Planned Parenthood’s policy goals.” He likewise explains that the CDC’s unwanted births number is the sum of births it classifies as “unintended’ (the category impacted by the faulty data) plus those classified as “mistimed” (which wasn’t affected)—and the numbers still prove to the decline even as quickly as that is taken in to account:
Between the 1988 and 1995 NSFGs, unwanted births dropped 2 percentage points, from 12.4 percent, to 10.2 percent, respectively. Mistimed births, unaffected by any type of error, dropped from 26.7 percent in 1988 to 20.5 percent in 1995. In various other words, of the almost 9 percent decline in unintended births from 1988 to 1995, from 39.1 percent to 30.six percent, only a relatively small section of that lose was subject to any type of survey error.
At most, then, Guttmacher can easily claim the decline shouldn’t have actually been as sharp as the old graph earned it look—not that the decline didn’t happen at all. It need to “still prove to a lose in the unintended price among bad women in 1994, and a subsequent large raise in 2001.”
Krumholz maintains that his original thesis still stands:
The accurate telling of history is that between the late 1980s and 1994, the unintended pregnancy price among bad women was going down, or was at worse unchanged. Even if it didn’t go down from 1987 to 1994, it was reduced compared to it is today. This occurred in a time as quickly as IUD usage was limited, and PPFA received much less taxpayer funding. Then, suddenly, there was a big jump from 1994 to 2001, merely as PPFA got bigger.
The media stories need to be “unintended pregnancy rates for bad women finally dropping to where they were in the ‘90s, prior to points got truly unsatisfactory in 2001,” and “much more competition required among providers of healthcare for bad women,” not “unintended pregnancies are finally dropping due to the fact that our liberal policies are working.”
Krumholz’s full follow-up at the Federalist is certainly worth your time—it elaborates on all the above, shows exactly how Guttmacher’s job props up a false narrative justifying ever-increasing federal tax dollars for Planned Parenthood, and offers some practical thoughts on exactly how pro-lifers need to respond.
Finally, Dreweke is still complaining concerning the rebuttal on Twitter, and Krumholz is tackling his objections point-by-point. Those are worth checking out, however one in particular deserves mention here:
Still factual errors in his piece, including that @Gutmacher is PP’s “research arm.” We’re fully independent https://t.co/wOZUCaiQSH
— Joerg Dreweke (@JoergDreweke) April 18, 2016
“Fully independent”? Carole Noveilli raised serious doubts concerning that last month at Live Action News. Guttmacher was considered a “special affiliate” of Planned Parenthood Federation of America for thirty years after both supposedly separated, was listed by Planned Parenthood as an “independent affiliate” in its tax filings as recently as 2007, and that the 2 organizations have actually donated millions of dollars to one an additional from 2001 to 2007.
Their potential material bonds stay suspicious enough, and their ideological bonds as abortion defenders are self-evident—and thinking about that deceit is a perennial staple of the pro-abortion cause, all Guttmacher’s output need to be read along with exactly what they’re not telling us in mind.
