Abortion in Washington Heights

I hadn't known this existed: Dominicans in Washington Heights are taking half of RU486 without prescription in order to induce abortion because they are uninsured or afraid of community disapproval or of immigration consequences, so unable to get a legal abortion. The most surprising thing is that women getting an illegal abortion have been arrested, one in Massachusetts.

[I'm not sure who is reading, so to be up-front about my bias: I'm the standard moderate "Abortion should be legal, but rare.", a 3rd generation Planned Parenthood supporter: my grandfather was a pediatrician very active pre-Roe, and even found an illegal abortion for the teenage daughter of a leader in the state legislature who had six months earlier blocked the bill that would have legalized abortion in Indiana.

I also donate to a fantastic organization, Efrat, that helps poor women in Israel who want more children but are considering abortion for economic reasons. (Israel is also the only country whose national health insurance pays for IVF; they cover I believe two completed pregnancies by IVF, without limit on the number of IVF cycles, and even for women who already have several children.) I know someone whose mother was coerced by his father into ending two pregnancies that she wanted, and they always wondered what these younger siblings would be like. No one regrets being alive and no women who choose to keep their pregnancies regret it. But choice is the key issue.]

All that said, I can't imagine not doing something to ensure that these women in Washington Heights and elsewhere have access to legal and safe abortion. How awful.

Waves of coverage

I don't know why I didn't notice the waves of coverage before, but it helps to be aware to have appropriate talking points for each wave.

1. Factual articles: motivation for paper, what it adds, main findings, conclusion, take-away point. Mostly in print media.

2. Reaction articles and 5-10 minutes radio interviews. Presumably people have already seen the factual articles in whole or part, so findings are presented briefly by someone else. They want to know findings in 1 sentence, take-away point in 1-2 sentences, why for each finding. Then they ask a bunch of questions well beyond the scope of your paper, and if you answered the questions as asked you would be speculating, so you need things to say that you are qualified to say related to their questions.

My favorite question from a radio interview, "Do couples who have sex have better relationships than couples who don't have sex?" I still don't know what I could have said.

Special interest press will pick out a tangential issue and expand on it so it seems like your study was about the background issue.

3. Call-in shows are like radio interviewers with more personal examples. The personal examples may line up exactly with your take-home points, which is extremely gratifying, or they may be interesting but something you only have anecdotal experience with.

4. Reactions to reactions: Party X raises objection Y. Talking point: One 20 word quote if it's a reasonable objection.


The hardest part, I find, is expanding the limits of what one can say. Medical journal papers are so extremely circumscribed, while press coverage asks about all kinds of issues that one could never justifiably publish in a medical journal without a whole separate study that one didn't do, so you just have to quote literature over and over.

Teaching birth control less controversial than thought?

1. The CDC removed information about condoms from its website several years ago, but it just returned the information.

2. I've been corresponding with one of the leaders of the virginity pledge movement, an evangelical minister. In his most recent email, he said that he thinks that virginity pledge leaders are probably all over the map on the question of teaching birth control in schools. That is, they want to encourage abstinence, but that's independent of what they think schools should teach in sex education class. Very refreshing!

I wish I'd known that when I was being ranted at by a Fox News Radio host about how schools "emasculate parents" by teaching birth control. I did tell a Fox News website writer. I'm curious how that will come out.

3. An article about an AME church in Albany that switched from abstinence-only to abstinence-plus approaches.

Sending messages to kids

Only one radio station so far has really pushed this "if you teach birth control, kids get the wrong message" idea. In fact, over 90% of parents, and even Sarah Palin, say kids should learn birth control in schools. Afterwards I looked at their webpage, which has a button at the very top for a "Babes Page", and an ad immediately after this segment had a couple of adults making sexual innuendo before going to a home improvement store. What kind of message is that sending to kids?

I don't mean to be all "This is a feminist bookstore; we have no humor section.", but which one is more salacious: the Maxim Hot 100 or a condom demonstration in the style of an airline instructional video?

The officially religious contexts are at least consistent. The Southern Baptists have no Babes Page.


(Btw, an amusing Israeli one for the Hebrew speakers.)

Media interviews

1. Radio interviews are much more heuristic than press interviews and bckground interviews for TV. The press and TV actually do care exactly why your study is different from the others. The radio just wants you to give relevant 15 second quotes, so you end up talking about things that may have nothing to do with your study at all; they're just relevant to what the radio interviewer is thinking about. In every radio interview I find myself saying that parents need to talk about sex with their kids, which is pretty much what everyone says in response to this type of study.

And on the late night talk radio, I got to mention that graham crackers were invented to prevent masturbation. The host was upset. He eats them every day.

Average length of a press interview: 25 minutes. One of the best press interviews was 17 minutes with the New Scientist in London; I was impressed how efficiently he got the information compared with the other press who were about 10 minutes longer.

Radio interviews are at most 5 minutes. Very convenient that they are after the press interviews, so the press talking points can be narrowed down.

I have my first TV interview tomorrow, and then another next week.

2. It's hard to come up with good quotes just from talking. I wrote down the technical parts so that I could describe it accurately in an easy to understand way, but I left non-technical parts to ad lib. I didn't remember that it was even more important to write down my conclusions in an easy quote until the articles came out. My quotes in the Washington Post interview were very weak, and they would have been stronger if I had written out the quotes I wanted to appear in print in advance. The process of going from oral to writing is hard.

E.g., the following is the kind of thing I wish I had said in one sentence: "Parents should teach their kids how to use condoms. It doesn't cause them to have sex any earlier, but it could save their future health and fertility." But this type of sentence doesn't come out of your mouth so concisely if you're speaking off the cuff. At least, it doesn't come out of my mouth.

3. The news cycle goes so fast. I was in transit between Chicago and Baltimore from 7 am until 2 pm, and people weren't calling my cell phone (though they had before), so I missed USA Today, CBS Radio (national or DC, not sure), and possibly another.

Today's coverage

My study was named one of the most obvious sex stories of 2008. The others are funnier, like that attractive people have more sex and that teen boys learn about sex from pornography.

Time Magazine Q and A

I can kind-of understand the headline of this story from Brazil.

Criticism of my pledge study

A blogger called Outside the Beltway writes about the validity of the study, and unleashes an intelligent barrage of comments from his readers about the methodology because he assumed I was doing standard regression analysis instead of matching. It's amazing how many methodological details people are able to pull from the media reports, and it's neat to see a political argument turn into a discussion of internal validity. I'm curious whether the phrase "parametric assumptions" will appear.

A few people --- Investors Business Daily and Valerie Huber cited at the end of the Post article --- have made accusations of ideological bias, which is a particularly ridiculous accusation to make about a statistician. If studies were determined by ideological bias, statistics would suddenly become much easier, and entire subfields of statistics such as procedures to adjust for multiple comparisons could disappear.

Ideological bias is also funny to raise about me, in particular. I vote straight blue and am firmly pro-choice, but I'm also frustratingly moderate. In discussions with reproductive health researchers, I stick up for the abstinence folks whenever it's warranted, and I read evangelical sex and dating books to the point that I know these better than some evangelical clergy, and I've even recommended evangelical dating books to friends.

The IBD editorial is particularly funny because it refers to the "fat wallet" of Mayor Bloomberg as having financed my study, which was not financed at all beyond the grants that paid for my PhD education, and then it links my study to the psilocybin study at Bayview, and repeats the same fallacy correlating teen pregnancy decline with rise of abstinence-only education.

They do get in a good line, "Abstinence-ed can't work as a one-night stand."