98% - More White House Lies in the HHS Fiasco

So many problems with the administration's assertion that 98% of Catholic women have used artificial contraception. Firstly, were it correct (and it's not) how would that justify the abuse of the conscience rights of a 2%? It doesn't justify it. Secondly, the study was done by the Guttmacher institute (you know, the research arm of Planned Parenthood? whose mission it is to see that every woman is contracepting?), and only the most uncritical, agenda-driven dingbats would accept that as a non-biased objectively verifiable data source. Thirdly--Oh, come on! Yes, many Catholics do not know their faith and so practice artificial contraception wrongly thinking they are not committing sin. Yes, it is a problem in our Church. A 98% problem? No way!

Blogger Lydia McGrew and philosopher Neil Manson's critical observations pick apart and leave this statistic as last week's roadkill. A small sample from the article:


...More strikingly, as Neil pointed out to me after looking up the study, it excluded any women who were a) not sexually active, where that is defined as having had sexual intercourse in the past three months (there go all the nuns), b) postpartum, c) pregnant, or d) trying to get pregnant! In other words, the study was specifically designed (as the prose discussion on p. 8 makes explicit, in bold print) to include only women for whom a pregnancy would be unintended and who are "at risk" of becoming pregnant. Whether or not it included women who considered themselves neither trying nor not trying to get pregnant (there are some such women in the world) is unclear. It's also unclear whether it included women who have had their reproductive organs removed because of some medical problem. Presumably the study was intended to exclude women in both of these categories, as neither would count as a woman "at risk of an unintended pregnancy."

Some folks in the White House and at Guttmacher need a course on research methodology. Read on here.

Update on this: Catholic Vote Action picks this up to bring even more clarity to this misuse of numbers.