We were having a water-cooler moment. A group of women and a couple of men were chatting about the news that the first television advert for abortion services will be shown this Monday night. “Did you know that one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime?” said one man. Did we? There were ten women hanging around. Three of us? The water-cooler moment suddenly got chillier. We looked at our shoes, said nothing.
The one in three statistic cited by Marie Stopes comes from a Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists paper, which in turn cites a pamphlet written more than 15 years ago by the Birth Control Trust, an organisation that soon after folded and left no trace of the pamphlet. The Royal College said that the statistic wasn’t theirs, and the Department of Health said simply that “we’re not able to comment on the likelihood that the one-in-three figure is accurate.”
In America, the one-in-three figure is also commonly used, and there the statistic trail is more robust: the work was done by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organisation into sexual health. They take abortion statistics for all ages of women in any given year and extrapolate to get to the one in three — they admit that it is a rough and ready estimate but are pretty confident it is “approximate.” Times Online
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