CT, CA, NY and NJ have only 21% of the U.S. population (a rate number that is shrinking and that will continue to shrink, by the way) but half of all U.S. abortion providers are located in those states and 36% of all U.S. abortions take place in those states.

The situation’s slightly more complicated than that. Those states also have teen pregnancy rates below the national average – most well below. And you’d expect more abortions where more abortion clinics were allowed, so that correlation doesn’t mean what I think you think it means.

Mike Melendez,

And did the Regnerus study have a control group?

I doubt that the authors of this paper were so dim as to ask themselves, “Let’s see, if we sign up nine thousand women who don’t want to get pregnant, educate them about contraception, and offer to pay the cost of the contraceptives, will they choose the more effective, more expensive ones? And have fewer unintended pregnancies than women using less effective methods or none at all?”

You (I presume) and a great many others who are trying to discredit this paper are morally opposed to contraception. Fine. That doesn’t mean you have to claim the paper tries to prove something that it doesn’t, and then demonstrate that it doesn’t prove it. Why not just condemn the authors for immorality in providing women with contraception? Why bother to discredit the paper?

That’s was controls are for. So, if you are right, the project assumed what is at question and, not surprisingly, discovered they were right.

There has been a great deal of sloppy reporting of Preventing Unintended Pregnancies by Providing No-Cost Contraception (available free online) including misguided analysis by its critics. The objective was not to answer the question, “Does providing free contraceptives result in a lower abortion rate?” Here is the objective as stated in the article:

OBJECTIVE: To promote the use of long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) methods (intrauterine devices [IUDs] and implants) and provide contraception at no cost to a large cohort of participants in an effort to reduce unintended pregnancies in our region.

This was not a “study” looking for pure knowledge of what happens with an experimental group and a control group. It was the write-up of a project by The Contraceptive Choice Project actively promoting the use of contraceptives.

To criticize it as a poorly designed study is to completely ignore what The Contraceptive Choice Project is all about and the authors’ intentions. No one should be at all surprised or offended that if you take a group of women who do not want to get pregnant and provide them with education and free contraceptives, they will choose the more effective (and more expensive) contraception methods and have fewer unplanned pregnancies.