Another wingnut lie comes up just plain wrong.

Wow, you know that the person who even thought up this idea was probably "pro-life". See what it said about texas. There's a shocker. Not.

I knew that didn't make any sense. Glad to hear it's being debunked.

I can certainly accept that this new more comprehensive study may have found no link where other smaller studies did find one--it's nothing new to have the state of scientific knowledge on something like this flip-flop after an early look at it.

I am puzzled by the incompleteness of part of the argument given for discounting the value of the earlier studies that suggested a link. Here's a snippet from a news piece on the issue (link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25076-2004Mar25.html)


Notice that they don't offer any scientific evidence or even suggest that any exists to support the idea that women with breast cancer are "more likely" to reveal an abortion. Sure, it seems plausible enough, but they are using this as the reason for giving those studies less weight, which seems to have been critical to shifting the outcome of this study. I would think they'd want to be able to say more than just that they "think" that women act in this way, if they are then going to use that as the basis for reaching a supposedly scientific conclusion.

I am not saying they are wrong, but am I the only one that finds that claim surprising?

(John Ashcroft reads the paper.)
Hmmmm. I wonder how we could resolve this data collection problem? Just asking women if they've ever had an abortion when they've recently found out they have breast cancer may skew things so that we cannot continue to show that our idealogy is supported by nature. How else can we scare the bejeezus out of women if we loose this connection between breast cancer and abortion?

I know, let's subpoena the medical records of tens of thousands of them nationwide. We'll say that their names, addresses etc won't be revealed.
Heh, heh.
(He turns the page quickly past an ad for lingerie.)

Scrat says: "they are using this as the reason for giving those studies less weight"
Well, I don't have a problem with THAT, because the initial hypothesis seems to have only come up as yet another way to prevent abortion. There was no valid reason other than that to even begin the studies, it seems to me. Looks like this is gonna be another "flat earth" issue!

Your bias is showing.

Are you suggesting that there are no risks involved with abortion? No? Good. Now, how do we ascertain what those risks might be? That's right, we study abortion. Of course, there are 3 types of people who might study abortion:

1) anti-abortion people, looking for additional reasons to convince women not to have abortions. (These people have an agenda that might reasonably taint their findings.)

2) pro-abortion people, looking for additional reasons to convince women that abortions are safe. (These people have an agenda that might reasonably taint their findings.)

3) people who are neutral on the issue, and genuinely interested in studying abortion with no preconceived or desired outcome to their research. (These people have no agenda, and we can reasonably assume that their findings are valid.)

Your bias leads you to conclude--absent any evidence I've seen in this discussion--that because the earlier studies suggested a link to breast cancer they must not only have been performed by group 1, but that we must conclude that it was group 1's agenda that caused anyone to study the question at all.

Using your standard, others could simply deny the validity of the new study by inferring from the fact that it's findings work to the benefit of group 2, the study must have been motivated by and the findings have to have been tainted by group 2's agenda.

While I suspect you will dismiss this logical point by assuming I am just an anti-abortion zealot (I am not), it won't make it go away. If you or anyone wants to argue that the earlier studies were flawed, some real evidence is needed to make that case in any legitimate, compelling way. To simply cast aside the research because someone "thinks" it is flawed is hardly evidence of superior or more valid research. If you are going to devalue some research because of the methodology, you need to be able to point to some scientific evidence that the methodology is less valid, not simply state that you "think" it is so.

Scrat,
After reading the article, that is what I got from it, okay?