{"id":12126,"date":"2012-08-24T20:05:16","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T01:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=12126"},"modified":"2012-08-24T20:07:31","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T01:07:31","slug":"more-wisdom-from-the-guy-who-brought-you-rape-cant-get-you-pregnant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/08\/24\/more-wisdom-from-the-guy-who-brought-you-rape-cant-get-you-pregnant\/","title":{"rendered":"More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You \u201cRape Can\u2019t Get You Pregnant\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Republic has the article More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You \u201cRape Can\u2019t Get You Pregnant\u201d<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s fine for magazines to debunk the pseudo-science of people in the news, but they shouldn’t use pseudo-science in one of their arguments.<\/p>\n

In the section\u00a0 titled “Legalizing abortion didn\u2019t make abortion safer<\/strong>” they quoted Dr. Willke\u00a0 as saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf, in fact, the elimination of illegal abortion eliminated back alleys, there should have been a perceptible drop in the number of women dying. That didn\u2019t happen. The line didn\u2019t even blip from 1967 to 1973 and 1974. … It just kept going down at the same slow rate. There was no evidence of a decline in mortality from legalization.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then to disprove what he said the article posits:<\/p>\n

In any event, evidence that his claim was totally bunk was readily available by 1989. In March of 1987, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study which read, in part, \u201cBetween 1972 and 1982 \u2026 [t]he overall death rate resulting from legal abortion dropped nearly fivefold, from 4.1 per 100,000 abortions in 1972 to 0.8 in 1982.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one case, Dr. Willke talks about the number of women dying.\u00a0 In the other case they quote the death rate per 100,000 abortions.\u00a0 Now if the death rate went down, but the number of abortions went up, then it is quite possible that the total number of deaths of women did not go down.<\/p>\n

I am not saying that this is true.\u00a0 I am just saying that people should not use arguments that are so easily ripped apart.\u00a0 The New Republic<\/em> is trying to show that Dr. Willke doesn’t know science, but they don’t show a great grasp of science themselves, or at least not statistics, math, or even numbers.<\/p>\n

Chalk up another example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media<\/strong><\/a> – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.<\/a>”<\/p>\n

You might find the rest of the article more enlightening.\u00a0 Too bad they had to spoil it with this blunder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Republic has the article More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You \u201cRape Can\u2019t Get You Pregnant\u201d. It’s fine for magazines to debunk the pseudo-science of people in the news, but they shouldn’t use pseudo-science in one of their arguments. In the section\u00a0 titled “Legalizing abortion didn\u2019t make abortion safer” they quoted Dr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-greenbergs-law-of-the-media","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12128,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12126\/revisions\/12128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}