It Lives!

Last fall we stumbled across the notion, embraced by the Alternative Reality Based Community, that abortions had risen under George Bush.  We continue to be unable to find any credible evidence that this is the case - the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which, with the Center for Disease Control, is the leading source for these national statistics, has not yet updated their 2000 national report.

However, the meme lives!  On this very Sunday, we catch a glimpse of it in the NY Times, and enjoy a full sighting with John Kerry on Meet The Press.

From a Times editorial gushing over Hillary's bold speech on abortion (and skipping past the controversial bit), we get this:

Without retreating on principle, she deftly shifted the focus of the abortion discussion to where there is the broadest agreement, and where President Bush's policy failure is most apparent - namely, abortion prevention.

Who knows what that meant?  But John Kerry was as clear as he could be, which is to say, he was relatively unambiguous and comprehensible:

And do you know that in fact abortion has gone up in these last few years with the draconian policies that Republicans have where they talk about it, but they do nothing to find this kind of place of discussion. And under President Clinton, abortion went down because we did have adequate family planning services, because we talked about counseling, adoption and other kinds of things.

As I noted last fall, the only source for this touching faith-based initiative of the left seems to be the dubious Stassen study.  But if anyone is aware of something a bit more credible, I would be delighted to look and learn.

MORE:  In a great "I'd better come out from behind Hillary's skirts" moment, Kerry realizes that if he is hoping to be a leader of the party in 2008, he cannot be a follower now.  Still on abortion:

So you have to have room to be able to talk about these things in a rational way.  We also need--I mean, I thought Hillary gave a good speech the other way in which she talked about the need--and many of us have talked about this for a long period of time.

Thoughts on Hillary's speech.

 

 

Comments

[Jor]

(cameo apperance)
CDC published 2001 data around Thanksgiving,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15562258

Summary: Slight decrease in # of abortions vs. 2000 (~4000), slight increase in abortion ratio (# of abortions vs. # of live births). Can't compare to before 2000, because # of reporting districts changed.

So, no evidence to back rhetoric.

I don't know when those "unconventional" sex-ed programs started, but I'd guess you'd need a year or two to see their effects. And even then, you'd really need to seperate # of abortions in states with "unconvential programs" vs. states with traditional programs. Further complications would be RU486, etc.

[Jor]

CDC Abstract

[AllenS]

This guy is annoying. Notice how he never answers a question. When asked about abortion, notice his nonanswer:

"So you have to have room to be able to talk about these things in a rational way. We also need--I mean, I thought Hillary gave a good speech the other way in which she talked about the need--and many of us have talked about this for a long period of time."

Lets remove the words between the ""--"", which are actually about Hillary giving a speech, and you end up with this: "We also need and many of us have talked about this for a long period of time." It has no meaning.

[Paul Zrimsek]

Doesn't look like the Draconian Talking Policy is having much of an effect one way or the other.

[TM]

Thanks very much, Jor. If memory serves, you were the one who dug up the Stassen report as well.

[Forbes]

So the Times thinks there should be a policy on abortion prevention. I bet if abortions were outlawed, there would be a lot fewer abortions performed, thereby achieving a prevention of abortion. Somehow I don't think this is what the Times had in mind--but it is indicative of the logical pretzels they twist themselves into to criticize the President.

Someone in a comment on a related post, IIRC, suggested that conservatives would be handing out chastity belts. I thought it was funny, maybe he/she should join forces with the Times.