Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
Few topics are so interesting to college students as sex. We don’t discuss it directly, but there are plenty of indirect indications. For example, this newspaper has a new feature every Friday called “Making WUpee,” which answers reader-submitted questions on sex. Also, the Forum pages have a history of being a hotbed for debate over reproduction rights-typically abortion. The problem is that people choose to manipulate information concerning sex to push an agenda.
Last Friday’s WUpee was a great demonstration of pushing an agenda. A reader asked Jill Ringold if standard birth control pills could be used as emergency contraception (EC). She only used a fifth of the column (133 words out of 634) to address this question. The remainder talked much about “better” forms of EC, like Plan B, obtaining counseling from SARAH, and the risks of sex in general. All valuable topics, but not what the reader was asking about.
What’s more, Ringold actually gave misleading information on the effectiveness of EC. “Plan B is not 100 percent effective, and it is definitely not a good form of regular birth control. Plan B reduces the risk of pregnancy by 89 percent when taken correctly, but that still means that 11 percent, or approximately one out of 10 women, will get pregnant,” she wrote. That’s fascinating, because one of her references (www.not-2-late.com) said that the maximal chance of getting pregnant having unprotected sex once is about 9 percent. So taking Plan B actually seems to increase fertility.
Risk of pregnancy is calculated in a specific way. According to the aforementioned website, of 100 women who had unprotected intercourse once during the second or third week of their menstrual cycle, eight will get pregnant. If those women had taken Plan B, only one would become pregnant, an 89 percent reduction. Furthermore, since these trials assume being in the middle of the cycle, the chance of getting pregnant after unprotected sex on a random day assuming correct Plan B use is 0.5 percent. Ringold pushed her own sexual health agenda by manipulating statistics and writing about what she wanted you to hear, not what you asked her.
The issue of a waiting period for abortions is currently contested on campus. One side says that women are already traumatized, and shouldn’t be further inconvenienced or meddled with. The other says that doctors should provide accurate medical information to patients, and this requires a waiting period to set in. The terms of the debate are, importantly, consideration for the good of the woman from both sides. Neither explicitly attacks a woman’s right to choose.
Paternalistic legislation, like this one, must meet a high standard of justification. I don’t see this law passing that test. If the laws’ supporters don’t want women acting hastily, that’s their problem. Women have the right to do what they want with their lives free from undue interference if it does not hurt others. If they want a hasty and ill-considered abortion, that’s their right. It is rare the instance where we know what is best for others better than they know it themselves, and rarer still the instance where we should compel them to do what we know is best.
Now, abortion is a business and doctors may be motivated to perform as many abortions as possible to earn money. This does create a potential conflict of interest. Thus, there should be a law mandating access to relevant medical information on abortions. Providers should explain this information to patients unless specifically requested otherwise, since you cannot assume that a patient knows what the procedure entails and it’s better to err on the side of caution. But, again, in the end, the woman has the right to decide for herself.
I don’t see how a waiting period is justified. While masked as a concern for women, this seems a move against abortion in general. Another example of how sex gets manipulated to push specific agendas.
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