Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Augh, what a wonderful example of science, journalism, and biases. Keep your eye on the ball:

The New York Times did a study on abortion notification laws. The headline and the start of the article was “Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told: For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion
rates that some advocates hoped for…”. The simplistic summary would seem to be, notification laws don’t work.
A different study was done at Baruch College. It focused on Texas in particular, and was reported in the Houston Chronicle. The headline and the start of the article were “Study: Texas parental law might lower — and delay — teen abortion: Texas’ rate of teen abortions fell after the state enacted a parental notification law, a new study found…”. The simplistic summary would seem to be, notification laws do work.
Even better, they quote the same professor! In the Times article, Ted Joyce says “There are ongoing trends that are pushing both birth rates and abortion rates down significantly, and those larger trends are more important than the effect of these laws,” while in the Chronicle article he says “The take-home message is these laws have impacts and they change kids’ behavior.”
Whee. So who’s right? Is somebody cooking the numbers? Is Joyce feeding somebody a line? No, of course not. The NYT doesn’t do that, and neither does Baruch’s faculty, especially when they’re publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The Times article takes data from many states, and finds a statistically insignificant contribution from the presence of notification laws nationwide; the Chronicle article finds a significant “drop after the law was passed,” in Texas alone, with causality being inferred from the research design by comparing the change in the abortion rate among minors to the change in the abortion rate among 18-year-olds not affected by the law. The “change in behavior” that Joyce refers to in his quote is actually a delay in abortions among 17.5-year-olds, who were more likely to wait until the second trimester when they’re 18 to not have to notify parents.

Both articles are right, but they’re asking different questions. This is where it’s important to be a careful reader.
This, right here, is why science and statistics education are important; why reading curricula have to include the skills to infer authorial biases; why a habit of getting information from multiple sources keeps you better informed than any one source can. The Times and the Chronicle both publish for specific audiences, and their choice of material and presentation affects perception of the results they filter. This is heavy-duty public policy and it’s important that policymakers — voters as well as elected officials — get the facts right.