World Abortion Estimates: An Audit Part VII: When Agenda Trumps Accuracy.

In earlier parts of this series, we have seen how abortion advocates have grossly inflated estimates of the number of abortions performed overseas and then tried to use those inaccurate numbers to argue for worldwide legalization of abortion. These "experts" admit their numbers are "uncertain" but publicize them anyway, leading one to ask what matters most to these "statisticians": accuracy or agenda?

"Experts" at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) claim that there are some 46 million abortions performed in the world each year. Nearly half (20 million) they officially label so-called "unsafe abortions." Both WHO and AGI claim that 78,000 women die each year from these "unsafe abortions."

We have already seen how tenuous a basis there is for many of these numbers. In developing nations and regions, where the vast majority of these "unsafe abortions" and abortion-related maternal deaths are reported to occur, the basis for these numbers is often quite flimsy. Prevalent in these counts are extrapolations of "community surveys," which survey health care workers or the general population in a given area, or "expert estimates" in which local abortionists or abortion advocates pass on their "educated guesses" based on their personal experience to statisticians at AGI or WHO. Then numbers are "adjusted" upwards to account for abortions and maternal deaths the statisticians believe the surveys and experts would have missed because of the reluctance of women to admit to something that might be painful, embarrassing, or illegal.

AGI and WHO admit their projections have problems. WHO, in its 1998 report Unsafe Abortion, said its estimates of "unsafe abortions" and abortion-related mortality "must be considered rough" and "necessarily have a high degree of uncertainty."

In a 1990 report on world abortions, AGI admitted that the data it used on "clandestine abortions" was "too uncertain to know whether the worldwide total is increasing or decreasing, since few studies in developing countries have provided accurate measures even for small areas. Combining the estimates that other authors have generally used with guesses as to the probable rates of abortions results in rough estimates of clandestine abortions" (emphasis added).1 There is nothing to indicate any broad improvement in data collection in later reports.

To the objective observer, the obvious question is why such groups would so fervently publicize "statistics" in which they have so little confidence. The answer, revealed in their own words below, is that agenda has a higher priority than accuracy.

How "Statistics" Serve the Abortion Agenda