Emails, Wendy Davis, Jan. 14-15, 2016
From: Selby, Gardner (CMG-Austin)
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2016 10:50 AM
Subject: Urgent inquiry for a fact check
Sen. Davis:
Good morning. I write because we are trying to check this claim in the recently filed legal brief that you offered with other women: “One in every three women has an abortion during her lifetime.”
A reader wondered if this was so.
I see your brief has a footnote to this 1998 study by Henshaw and also have learned from the Guttmacher Institute of this study.
Is the 1998 study the basis of the brief’s one-in-three statement? Anything else to consider by way of backup information?
I hope to complete our fact check soon.
Thanks.
g.
W. Gardner Selby
Reporter / News
Austin American-Statesman
PolitiFact Texas
From: Wendy Davis
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2016 3:03 PM
Here’s the response I got to your inquiry from one of the lawyers who drafted our Amicus brief:
The 1998 study was the source we used for our brief. It has also been cited as authority in other, more recent articles, such as the 2011 Norris article cited in footnote 6 of our brief.
Hope you find this helpful.
Best,
-wendy
From: Selby, Gardner (CMG-Austin)
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2016 3:29 PM
Thanks; who is the attorney?
g.
10:18 p.m.
Jan. 14, 2016
Linda Goldstein was one of our attorneys on the Amicus briefs. CC’ing her here in case you want her email info.
Also, from the Center for Reproductive Rights, here is more info: [I’ve also cc’d Jill Mizell with CRR here for your info in case you would like to contact her.]
To answer the first part of the question, the 1998 study by Henshaw is a precursor to the estimate that 1 in 3 women will have an abortion by the age of 45 (also known as the “lifetime incidence” of abortion), but it is not the source of the estimate. Henshaw actually found that 43% of women will have an abortion by the age of 45, based on 1992 rates.
The 1-in-3 estimate comes from the Guttmacher study by Jones and Kavanaugh released in 2011 in the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. One of the goals of this study was to update the estimate provided by Henshaw (1998) using data from Guttmacher’s 2008 Abortion Patient Survey. Data suggested the overall abortion rate was declining and they hypothesized that the lifetime incidence of abortion would decline as well. They use the same methodology used by Henshaw (1998) to calculate the estimate.
On the second question, two additional things to take into consideration:
1. Guttmacher’s Abortion Patient Survey is by far the most exhaustive and methodologically rigorous data collection effort on abortion incidence in the US (I’m happy to go into more details on this if necessary, although the reporter may want to just talk to someone at Guttmacher). The CDC collects limited data on abortion, and they rely on voluntary reports so their data are incomplete. For example, CDC data does not include the state of CA. The result is they consistently underestimate abortion incidence.
2. Guttmacher conducted their most recent Abortion Patient Survey in 2014 and are in the process of analyzing the data. We expect they will have an updated lifetime incidence estimate based on 2014 rates by next year.