Lies, damn lies, and Bob Novak’s statistics

April 24, 2006

The Dems believe there will be fewer abortions if there’s greater access to contraception. [tag]Bob Novak[/tag] thinks Dems are guilty of “fuzzy abortion math.”

The widely publicized claim by Senate [tag]Democrat[/tag]ic Leader [tag]Harry Reid[/tag] and Sen. [tag]Hillary Rodham Clinton[/tag] that state-funded contraception aid cuts down abortion as prevention of unwanted pregnancies is contradicted by figures from the same abortion think tank the senators relied on for an April 18 op-ed in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that California spends more than three times as much on [tag]contraception[/tag] as South Dakota for each woman who requests such services. However, California’s rate of [tag]abortion[/tag] per 1,000 women is 31.2 percent, nearly six times as high as South Dakota’s 5.5 percent.

Reid and Clinton chided South Dakota for passing an anti-abortion law while being “one of the most difficult states” for low-income women to get contraceptive devices, which the senators claim drives up abortion.

Maybe in Novak Land, this comparison makes sense. Contraceptives are widely available in [tag]California[/tag], but California has plenty of abortions. South Dakota barely spends anything on making contraception available, and yet, the state has one of the lowest abortion rates in the country. This, as far as Novak is concerned, helps prove that Dems are wrong — if less contraception led to more abortion, South Dakota’s wouldn’t have such a miniscule abortion rate.

Except Novak is leaving out a few pertinent details, such as the overwhelming obstacles women who want to end their pregnancies face in [tag]South Dakota[/tag].

The last doctor in South Dakota to perform abortions stopped about eight years ago; the consensus in the medical community is that offering the procedure is not worth the stigma of being branded a baby killer.

South Dakota is one of only three states to have only one abortion provider — North Dakota and Mississippi are the other two — but at nearly 76,000 square miles, the Mount Rushmore State is the biggest of the three. What’s more, the state’s lone clinic offers abortions once a week, but which day each week depends on when out-of-state doctors will visit.

Of course, South Dakota is also home to some of the nation’s poorest counties, which makes it awfully difficult for women with meager resources to travel several hundred miles.

Given these conditions, Novak’s analogy is painfully stupid. Of course South Dakota’s abortion rate is extremely low — they’ve had a de facto ban in place for years. This doesn’t prove that limited access to birth control has no effect on unwanted pregnancies; it proves that if you limit a large state to one clinic that most women find inaccessible, there won’t be many abortions in a state.

I don’t expect much from Novak, but this is ridiculous, even for him.

No-facts’ credibility on this is just slightly higher than that of Tony “Psycho” Perkins himself. I know it’s always of questionable value even to engage dishonest people in situations like this, but given the great potential of PFA to prove a Democratic wedge issue, I hope Reid and others in leadership push back hard against this latest excretion from the Prince of Darkness.

  • It also apparently doesn’t take into account the population disparity between the two states. Of course there will be more abortions in California simply because there are more people there.

    What a dolt…

  • What are the per capita rates of children in poverty in SD vs. CA? I bet a dollar to a dime that SD has more poor children. Novak’s observations and comparison are meanless, as CB noted.

    Living in a state bordering SD I am really sick of SD being held up as a model for anything. Our Governer used SD as an excuse for lowering taxes. “Look how tax rates in MN compare to neighboring states” says the jackass. Of course any reasonable person would say OK, let’s look at the state of the SD economy and qulaity of life along side that. Let’s look at how many fortune 500 companies are moving their operations to SD because things are so great there.

    The only thing SD is a model for is improving a third world country. If Sudan were more like SD that would be a good thing. I cannot believe anyone buys this kind of rethug crap.

    I would also like to point out that the lone abortion clinic in SD was in Sioux Falls (bordering on MN and IA) and was staffed by doctors from Minneapolis who flew in weekly. In reality, driving to Minneapolis for an abortion is not really that much worse than what they had. At least the clinics here are open 5 days a week.

  • I’d like to see some more statistics – like how many single mothers, teen pregnancies, and children born into poverty. How does South Dakota really fare against other states. It seems like a no-brainer argument. You’re not going to be able to stop people (underage or not) from having sex, as much as some would like to try. So it only follows that if we grant access to sexual education and contraceptives, then the number of unwanted pregancies, and thus abortions, would decrerase.

  • kanopsis,

    The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that California spends more than three times as much on contraception as South Dakota for each woman who requests such services. However, California’s rate of abortion per 1,000 women is 31.2 percent, nearly six times as high as South Dakota’s 5.5 percent.

    The figures reported by Novak are rates which account for population differences. Novak is a dolt, but not on this count.

  • What Bob Novak doesn’t take into account is the fact that the Beach Boys song is not entitled…

    … ‘I wish they all could be South Dakota girls’.

    😉

  • Speaking of fuzzy math:
    “The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that California spends more than three times as much on contraception as South Dakota for each woman who requests such services. However, California’s rate of abortion per 1,000 women is 31.2 percent, nearly six times as high as South Dakota’s 5.5 percent”
    As simple fact check would show that a rate “per 1000 women” is not a percent. 31.2 per 1000 women is 3.12% (and 5.5 per 100 is .55%). This is not an insignificant difference because 31.2%-5.5%=25.7%, whereas 3.12%-.55%=2.57%. My guess is that this was not an oversight but was intentional to make the difference seem greater than it actually was. Way to go Bob.

  • Also, a brief analysis of the “Alan Guttmacher Institute” (http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/sfaa.html) and a state by state comparison from the US census would show some extreme difference between California and South Dakota. California is far more ethnically diverse. California is younger. California has more people living under the poverty level. Finaaly California is far more urban that South Dakota. South Dakota’s Largest City Sioux Falls has a population of 133,834. A quick search through California found at least 15 cities with a population larger than Sioux City. And, according to The Alan Guttmacher Institute 88% of abortions are performed on women from urban areas. Given that South Dakota only has one clinic, and many qomen get abortions in other states, I would say that South Dakota is really doing quite poorly.

  • RhodyJim, I don’t have time to look more deeply into this but it appears that the numbers quoted above are per 1000 women. For some reason the original source reports these numbers as percentages. While I was trying to track this down, I found that the Alan Gutmacher Institute web site has a table make which allows you to construct a table which compares states on a number measure of reproductive freedom and economics. Go take a look.

  • Any even more important stat to look at is the rate of (botched) illegal abortions. I suspect that if one looked at ER admit records for cleanup after failed home abortions, South Dakota would win handily. Likewise, I suspect they’ll lead in deaths due to lack of access to safe and legal abortion.

  • Novak might as well brag about the low rates of gun violence in prisons. This would be true, since there are virtully no guns in prison. But it doesn’t make it a safe and non-violent place either.

  • The only way to reach an empirical conclusion would be to increase or decrease state-funded contraceptives within, say, SD and see what the effect is, if any, on the abortion rate.

    Even that experiment – unlikely as it is to be performed – would leave open the very real possibility of confounding, uncontrolled variables (changes in the age composition of the population, changed economic conditions, changes in the “meaning” of children, etc).

    But no one, in this area in particular, is interested in empirical facts, so why bother?

  • It looks to me like the “percentage” error is all Novak’s which is fairly amusing given that he titles that section of his screed “fuzzy math”.

    The Guttmacher Institute does clearly have these numbers expressed as a rate per 1000 women, so Novak appears to be a fool who should save the math lectures for some time after he’s completed a basic statistics course.

    See http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sfaa/california.html

  • If I were an OB GYN in South Dakota, I hope I would have sufficient integrity to either treat my patients without regard to pressure from my community, or else pull up stakes and practice my love in a “free state.”

    Yes, I know there are physicians who are personally opposed to abortion and whose personal or religious scruples override all else, but I also know there are doctors who have no personal objection to the procedure but who refuse to perform it under any circumstances out of fear of disapproval by their neighbors. It may be the Heartland of America, but it sure ain’t the home of the brave.

  • And regarding RhodyJim’s other points, yes there are all kinds of co-variances available from the data.

    For someone like Novak to grab these two single pairings out of all of the possible points available:

    a) lower availability of contraception in SD versus CA and
    b) lower abortion rates (per 1000) in SD versus CA

    and claim that therefore lower availability of contraceptoin causes lower abortion rates is dishonest on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.

    Even if one did want to try and warp some “causation” out of whatever correlation if any exists between these two variables, at the very least one would have to determine whether that correlation applies to the whole data set.

    Novak instead has just walked in, grabbed (or more likely cherry-picked) two states that conveniently fit his argument and left the building.

    What a jerk.

  • The other stat that is missing is the number of women from SD who got their abortion out of state (MN, IA, etc.). That would be a more accurate gauge than # of abortions within the state.

  • Gridlock,

    It’s even simpler than that, as I’ll hopefully demonstrate. Novak simply cherry-picked two states which made his pre-existing hypothesis work. It is just as easy to pick two states which “prove” the opposite.

    His argument is as fuzzy as math gets.

    If you use the TableMaker from the Guttmacher site, it’s remarkably easy to find out just how Novak’s cherries were picked.

    You can create a table which shows the spending on contraceptives (or whatever other “contraceptive” measure you want to use as your proxy) against the rate of abortion per 1000 women.

    Then you just sift through the data and try to find a pair of states which matches your pre-existing hypothesis.

    If you want to make an intellectually lazy argument that lower contraception availability “causes” lower abortion rates, then you pick a one state that has a low a) and low b) and a second state that has higher than average ratings on both stats, e.g. SD and CA. You write a little article call yourself Bob Novak, and mail it in.

    Of course if you want to “prove” the other causation, you just pick two different states, e.g. NJ and VT. Oh my God, Vermont spends $110 per woman on contraception and only has 11 abortions per 1000 women, NJ spends only $55 per woman and it has a 38 per 1000 women.

    I’ve just “proved” the opposite hypothesis in the same intellectually bankrupt manner that Bob Novak gets paid to use.

    Come on Dems get out there and expose this bozo!

  • JR,

    Thanks for doing the work.

    So NJ spends half as much on contraception and has three times as many abortions per 1000 than Vermont.

  • It is also widely misleading to compare 2 states that have very dissimilar abortion laws. South Dakota places several restrictions on abortion, such as parents being notified in the case of minors and a woman must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided. California has no restrictions. There are also 400 abortion clinics in California, compared to South Dakota’s 1, which only operates one day of the week. This is hardly a fair comparison.

  • “It is also widely misleading to compare 2 states that have very dissimilar abortion laws. South Dakota places several restrictions on abortion, such as parents being notified in the case of minors and a woman must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided. California has no restrictions. There are also 400 abortion clinics in California, compared to South Dakota’s 1, which only operates one day of the week. This is hardly a fair comparison.” – VT

    I don’t think you will make a compelling case with conservatives when you point out all the ‘great reasons’ why South Dakota has fewer abortions. See, their solutions are working 😉

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