The Mail on Teenage Abortions
Posted by Dave Cross
July 5th, 2011
[This is cross-posted from Davblog]
A lot of tabloid watchers have obviously been looking elsewhere today, but the Mail still manages to peddle its usual level of bullshit.
I was particularly drawn to this piece [istyosty link]. In it they examine recent Department of Health figures on the number of girls of sixteen or under who have an abortion.
The Mail line is predictable.
Campaigners warned that the alarming figures, revealed by the Department of Health, were representative of a society where abortion was ‘on demand’ – even for very young girls who legally should not be having sex.
But there’s another way of looking at this data.
Here’s the table that the Mail published.
Now I’m not saying for a second that this is an acceptable level of teen abortions. Obviously anyone would hope for those figures to be far smaller – zero even. But take a close look at the figures for the last four years.
The number of abortions carried out on girls of sixteen and under has fallen every year since 2007. In fact the figure is now 15% lower than it was at its peak.
Surely that has to be seen as a good thing. That’s a substantial fall over four years. But no. The Mail looked at these figures and decided to spin it as a comment on our over-sexed society rather than the success story that it undoubtedly is.
Categories: Healthcare |
Perhaps the real problem for the Mail is that the figures appear to show the downward trend began under Labour. This doesn’t mean anything Labour did lead to this result, but in the mindset of tabloid journalism it would constitute ‘proof’ and if a ‘fact’ can’t be made to fit the editorial line it must be ignored.
Those figures don’t show a fall, they show the numbers going back to what they originally were, unless you have some other evidence, this is most likely regression to the mean, not a decline.
Following on from Sam. If you check the longer-term figures you’ll see there hasn’t really been much change in the rates of early teen pregnancies and abortions for decades. Despite the tabloid hysteria, the problem in the UK is we’ve always had a high level, not that it’s getting worse.
i was rather suspicious of the “handicap and illness” statistics to the left, perticually the 1352 “musculoskeletal problems including clubbed foot or extra figures and toes”, “including” is not the same as “largely” “mostly” and cirtainly not “entirely”, the body text of the article show the number to actually be 18.
clearly more a detailed breakdown was released, yet the mail chose to put the larger misleading number is the stat box, and hide the real one away on paragraph 20.
I like the fact that they felt the need to include a “10 or under” column, with a “0″ in every row.
“But take a close look at the figures for the last four years.”
Aren’t you guilty of cherry-picking the data to get a result that proves your point?
There’s no need to stoop to their level!
These are the scary fact, my guess us that sex education in school is also more than needed
This item just goes to show that you can’t trust tabloid journalists with statistics – they can’t perform an objective analysis as they have an agenda to push.
Isn’t the most worrying the Cleft Palate statistics? This is reasonably easily treatable, and quite common. How on earth can that be grounds for abortion? How realiable are these stats?
Are we sure that Liz Jones has done an article already suggesting “teenage abortionists should be killed at birth!” …? I think we should be told.