Glamour Magazine’s “5 Mind-Blowing Facts About Abortion” is Riddled With Errors

Opinion   |   Emily Derois   |   Jun 6, 2016   |   6:29PM   |   Washington, DC

The women’s fashion magazine Glamour released an article on Friday giving erroneous facts about abortion. The liberal magazine discussed five “mind blowing facts about abortion in America,” however the “facts” it presented were misleading and inaccurate.

In the article, Glamour claims that a staggering number of Texas women have attempted to self-induce an abortion. The magazine cited a study led by the Researchers from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, which claimed that somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 women have performed a self-induced abortion. However, there is ample evidence that this study is inaccurate.

In a prior article, LifeNews examined the study:

The numbers almost certainly are a gross exaggeration. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, there were 73,000 abortions in 2011 in Texas before the laws took effect. The study’s estimates that abortions increased up to 240,000 after the pro-life laws were passed seems extremely unlikely.

LifeNews went on to explain the unreliability of the study’s sources:

The study’s researchers have a history of biased, pro-abortion reporting. The University of California at San Francisco, which was involved with the Texas study, also published a study in 2013 advocating to allow non-doctors to perform surgical abortions and downplaying the high complication rates that they discovered.

The research also was heavily skewed by a question that asked women if they thought a friend or acquaintance had ever attempted to self-abort; and these suppositions also were counted in the study.

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Another “fact” provided in Glamour’s article is that first-term abortions rarely involve serious complications.

“A first-trimester abortion is one of the safest medical procedures out there, carrying minimal risk of complications that might lead to hospital care,” Glamour said. They went on to reference a 2012 study that claims women are up to 14 times more likely to die as a result of childbirth complications than from an abortion.

However, evidence suggests otherwise.

LifeNews previously reported on a study led by Dr. Byron Calhoun, vice chair of West Virginia University-Charleston’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which examined the data on abortion-related deaths. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Catholic medical journal Linacre Quarterly, provided a few examples of how the numbers presented by these studies are miscued and misleading. The study’s full abstract gave some of these methods:

Serious health complications arising from abortion which threaten the life of the woman are usually handled by hospital emergency rooms, not the abortion provider. Despite being the result of physical complications of the abortion procedure, these abortion-related deaths are reported as maternal deaths.

Abortion-related mortality is vastly underreported “due to poor quality reporting and definitional issues”. Dr. Calhoun’s research shows that “maternal deaths,” “late maternal deaths,” “pregnancy-related deaths,” and “pregnancy-associated deaths” are being defined to include, but not identify, “abortion-related deaths.”

Plus, pro-abortion researchers never account for the fact that an abortion is always deadly to the unborn child.

Glamour magazine is undoubtedly writing from a liberal slant, and their articles on abortion issues certainly reflect that stance. Their inaccurate and misleading information normalizes the very serious nature of abortion. An abortion is a procedure that drastically alters the mother’s life, often inflicting negative mental or physical effects, and kills her unborn baby. Women need to be educated on the realities of abortion.

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