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Originally Posted by willravel
Still, bear in mind that the statistic I liked above is from a pro-life website. I'm not 100% sure about the number's reliability.
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Thank you for acknowledging this will. I thought it was suspect myself, so I did a bit of searching.
It appears they removed part of the sentence for effect. It changes the meaning considerably, in my opinion.
"Abortion No" said this:
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47% of all abortions are performed on women who have had at least one previous abortion.
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They claim this statistic is taken from "pro-abortion sites, like the Alan Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood's Family Planning Perspectives."
The AGI said:
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Each year, about two out of every 100 women aged 15–44 have an abortion; 47% of them have had at least one previous abortion.
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For clarification, I went to the original source. AGI took this statistic from
Jones RK, Darroch JE and Henshaw SK, Patterns in the socioeconomic characteristics of women obtaining abortions in 2000–2001, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2002, 34(5):226–235..
which said:
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A large proportion (73%) of all women having abortions had been pregnant before: Some 48% had had a previous abortion, including 36% who had experienced both a previous birth and an abortion and 12% who had experienced only a previous abortion. It is also worth noting that 52% of women having abortions in 2000 intended to have (more) children in the future, and 22% were unsure of their birth intentions (not shown).
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So there we have it. You can make it seem epidemic by saying that 47% of abortions are performed on women who had a previous one by omitting the rest of the sentence.
47% seems like a lot until you consider all of the factors. Only 2 out of every 100 women has an abortion, which means that less than 1% of women will have more than one abortion. Even more, of those 47%, 36% have had a child AND an abortion, meaning they're not just aborting and aborting like No Abortion suggests.