CV NEWS FEED // Catholic pro-life analyst Michael New slammed a study recently cited by pro-abotion activists and the mainstream media as “one of the worst and most misleading pieces of advocacy research” he has “ever encountered.”
New refuted the research in a Thursday National Review piece titled “No, 64,000 Children Have Not Been Conceived in Rape in States with Pro-Life Laws.”
“This week, the academic journal JAMA Internal Medicine published a study claiming that … tens of thousands of pregnancies resulted from rape in states that enacted strong post-Dobbs pro-life laws,” he wrote.
The JAMA study suggested that pro-life laws “resulted in 64,565 children conceived in rape,” New explained, and that statistic was “quickly and uncritically covered by a number of mainstream media outlets including CNN, NBC News, the Houston Chronicle, Axios, Time, and the Huffington Post.”
“To call those figures an exaggeration would be an understatement,” New stressed.
He called the study “frankly one of the worst and most misleading pieces of advocacy research that I have ever encountered in my years as a social scientist.”
“Furthermore, the fact that this article appeared in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal grants it legitimacy and credibility that it absolutely does not deserve,” he went on.
New pointed to “significant problems with the methodology” used by the study’s authors. He gave several examples – including the study’s use of an “exceptionally high figure” for the percentage of rapes that result in a pregnancy and the fact that there are “extremely wide disparities in reported rape statistics.”
“It should come as no surprise that some of the authors of this article are employed by organizations that support legal abortion,” New noted.
The study’s lead author is the medical director of Planned Parenthood’s Montana state affiliate, New pointed out. “The mainstream media outlets that ran stories about this study unsurprisingly failed to cover this blatant conflict of interest.”
He also criticized JAMA for publishing such a flawed study compiled by biased researchers.
“In recent years many academic journals, particularly in the field of public health, have published opinion pieces or thinly researched articles by supporters of legal abortion,” New wrote, citing another recent example. “Overall, academic journals should stick to publishing rigorous peer-reviewed research instead of serving mouthpieces for supporters of legal abortion.”
According to the Harvard Library, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) “features original research, reviews, and editorials covering all aspects of the biomedical sciences.”
“It’s published by the American Medical Association [(AMA)],” Harvard Library noted.
Read New’s full piece here.
