Comments on: Abortion restrictions for the fetus-indifferent

By: El Jefe

El Jefe — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 01:49:20 +0000

Reading the jargon in the some of these studies reminds me of Winston Churchill’s comment: “What if I had said–instead of ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’–’Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter.’”

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 20:25:47 +0000

Thanks for your reply, Mr. Klick. We will follows your future research with much interest.

By: Jon Klick

Jon Klick — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:27:12 +0000

Thanks for all the helpful comments. Regarding whether states randomly adopt waiting periods, one would think that they do not and the paper does investigate this a bit through instrumental variables techniques. Interestingly, the result appears to be larger when this self-selection is accounted for. As for why I focused on suicide, I started with a British Medical Journal article that had found (in a dataset of Finnish women) women who aborted were more likely to commit suicide than either those who miscarried or those who delivered their babies. Some pro-life groups picked up on this study, but it struck me as a case where self-selection may be important (as the BMJ authors suggest) as some of the same forces that induce some women to choose abortion may also be related to mental health. To avoid this possibility, the natural experiment (or differences-in-differences methodology seemed to make sense). Perhaps one could find a similar effect in other indicators of mental health, though data problems become more acute. I am currently examining the funding restrictions and suicide result more carefully, and I think there is some connection there too.

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:17:51 +0000

Sorry, link didn’t work. Maybe just cut and paste.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4379422.stm

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:14:22 +0000

BBC is reporting on a counter study from the British Medical Journal to the first one Adam lists.

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:41:41 +0000

A critique:
http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/10/24/15423/792

By: Frank McIntyre

Frank McIntyre — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:03:41 +0000

Ed,

I agree that that is a likely problem. Although the suicide rate is going to be higher for those that have abortions, it still seems a stretch that it would be so important to cause this big of a rise. And abortion impacts are certainly the sort of thing to suffer from opportunistic statistical inference. It is much more compelling when the causal chain is laid out explicitly and the links are obvious and confirmable.

By: ed

ed — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:40:39 +0000

I, of course, agree with everything Frank said, but I think there is yet another reason to be skeptical of the findings.

If you wanted to show that waiting period laws are a good idea, you could just look at a long list of social pathologies, and just by chance there would likely be one or two that appeared to be trending better in states that adopted parental consent laws. You could then publish your “statistically significant” findings as evidence that parental consent laws are a good thing.

I don’t know if this is what happened here, but since I’ve never before heard of a strong connection between suicide and abortion laws, I’m suspicious. I’d expect a priori any such connection to be small and probably empirically undetectable. I’d be more convinced if a similar relationship could be found for several other measures of mental health, or if the connection could be made more explicitly to those who have considered abortions. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read the papers.)

By: Wilfried

Wilfried — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:05:23 +0000

Indeed, Frank. The weaknesses of the study I mentioned are obvious. Point is that it too will be cited as “a recent study shows …” And the ideas contained in that study will of course overjoy some and be misused… I must say I was suprised that the Journal of Religion and Society would publish such a piece, which is “tentative” but still suggests gross generalizations.

Thanks for your helpful insights!

By: Frank McIntyre

Frank McIntyre — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:46:59 +0000

Wilfried and Julie,

Your response is perfectly reasonable one– faced with a study the methodology of which you suspect is not sound but have no way to evaluate. Since I do this stuff for a living I feel more confident in evaluating the good from the bad.

For example, Wilfried, your alternative study suffers from three severe problems not found in the other one. There is a severe reverse causality issue that is not so obvious a problem in the first, countries are far more varied in their unobservables than U.S. states, and the study probably uses a cross section of countries rather than following states over time and controlling for corss sectional differences. The abortion study controls for (and therefore is not affected by) all fixed differences across states in a way that makes the results at least possible. A cross sectional study can’t do this.