Media Consistently Misses Decline in Number of Abortions
Michael J. New, Ph.D.

It goes without saying that abortion is one of the most scrutinized issues in American politics. The mainstream media is always eager to detail the positions of various candidates, document platform fights, and analyze the views of prospective Supreme Court nominees. However, despite this, the media has only granted scant coverage to the consistent decline in the number of abortions since the early 1990s.

Have you read much, or anything, about how the number of abortions peaked at 1.6 million in 1990 but is now slightly under 1.3 million abortions? Have you read anything about the impact of commonsense state legislation which, studies show, has reduced the number of abortions?

The only occasions when the media has used (or, in some cases, abused) these numbers has been to advance pro-abortion political objectives. The coverage by the New York Times provides a good example.

The Times ran brief stories on declining abortion figures in both 1996 and 1997. However, between 1998 and 2004, the Times was virtually silent on the topic. Interestingly, the only occasions where the Times referenced declining abortion figures were during sympathetic articles about the approval of the abortifacient RU486 and the increased amenities that abortion clinics were offering women to increase business.

However, during the 2004 presidential election, abortion trends suddenly became a hot topic. This was partly because several commentators were using the Clinton-era decline to urge pro-life voters to support candidates who supported abortion.

A New York Times op-ed by Mark Roche—the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame—made this exact point. Roche contrasted the slight increase in abortions that occurred under the Reagan administration with the decline during Bill Clinton’s presidency to argue counter-intuitively that the interests of abortion opponents might be better served by electing a President who supported legalized abortion.

Perhaps even more notoriously, ethicist Glen Stassen wrote a widely circulated article for the magazine Sojourners, arguing that abortions had actually increased since President Bush’s inauguration. This article was published by a number of major newspapers around the country, including the Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, and Hartford Courant. Furthermore, Stassen’s research was cited in articles that appeared in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Now there was a number of problems with Stassen’s analysis, including the fact he analyzed data from only 16 states. Furthermore, some of these states, including Colorado and Arizona, specifically attributed their increases to more rigorous reporting standards.

Still Stassen’s claims have stuck. Many pro-abortion figures, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. John Kerry, and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, have publicly cited alleged increases in the incidence of abortion during the first years of the Bush administration.

However, to its credit, FactCheck.Org last May published a thorough critique of Stassen’s argument, titled  “The Biography of a Bad Statistic: Abortions rising under Bush? Not true. How that false claim came to be—and lives on.” (The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and is widely respected.)

Intriguingly, the widespread acceptance of Stassen’s numbers prompted the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) to conduct a special analysis to update its comprehensive census of abortion providers for the year 2000.

This is significant, because AGI is the “special affiliate” of Planned Parenthood.

AGI’s study analyzed data from 43 states determined to have reliable reporting systems. The results directly contradict Stassen’s assertions.

AGI found that the number of abortions actually decreased since President Bush took office.

Specifically, the AGI figures show abortions decreased nationwide by 0.8 percent in 2001 and by another 0.8 percent in 2002. Stassen himself has praised the AGI study and has acknowledged that it was better than his own original effort.

Now, considering the attention that Stassen’s faulty analysis received in the mainstream media, one would hope that media organizations would be interested in correcting this misinformation that Stassen and others disseminated during the 2004 election. Unfortunately, the AGI study has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Almost no major newspapers reported on the findings. The Buffalo News made a brief reference to the study in an editorial criticizing Howard Dean and the Boston Globe mentioned the decline in an article about welfare. However, no other major news organizations reported on the study in the weeks after it was released.

Now, to its credit the Washington Post recently did run a recent article about the long-term decline in the abortion rate where the Guttmacher figures were cited. However, the Post article was somewhat disappointing. It did not explicitly correct Stassen’s misinformation and no one representing a pro-life organization was quoted in the article.

Even worse, no one cited legislation as a potential reason why abortions have declined. This is despite the fact that increasing numbers of states enacted partial-birth abortion bans, parental involvement laws, waiting periods, and informed consent laws during the 1990s.

Furthermore, a sizable body of social science evidence, including my 2004 Heritage Foundation study, finds that state-level legislation is effective at reducing the number of abortions that occur.

Overall, the media’s handling of the abortion issue is in some respects unsurprising. Pro-lifers cannot always rely on the mainstream media to adequately cover issues that are of particular interest to them.

Furthermore, broad trends will always be overshadowed by sensational events or new developments.

However, nearly all media organizations pride themselves on accuracy. As such, it is disheartening that major news organizations remain unwilling to correct misinformation which continues to distort the abortion debate.

Michael J. New, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a summer fellow at the Heritage Foundation.