I’m a little retarded, but I tried to read that study and it seems rather specious. They basically admit they have to extrapolate the number of pregnancies that result from rape and go from there. Is there a kiwi data scientist who we can page for comment?
I’m not a prolifer, for the record. I just don’t like to see people dressing up bullshit as science.
Time to bust out my credentials as Dr. internet friend, PhD.
First of all, this is not even a proper scientific paper, it's a "research letter". The main difference being a proper article is backed up with lots of figures and data, while this piece of shit has a grand total of 2 tables.
Because to our knowledge no recent reliable state-level data on completed vaginal rapes (forced and/or drug/alcohol–facilitated vaginal penetration) are available, we analyzed multiple data sources to estimate reported and unreported rapes in states with total abortion bans (Table 15).
This is already super suspect, as no good methods section should start with the equivalent of "oh I dunno, but here's my guess." I took a look into the supplementary methodologies, and it's really not much better. Their estimates essentially boil down to "we just timesed all the rape related ratios we could think of together and got a number". To quote the supplementary methods:
Our estimates have severe limitations.
Their results section is one paragraph, which is laughable. Even more laughable is them trying to pass off multiplying some numbers off as real scientific research. The discussion spends most of its time dooming and glooming how these numbers are too high, and if they had the REAL numbers it would be even higher. They even acknowledge that a number of these women could easily search for abortions in different states or through illegal methods, but never take that into account on their estimations. It basically ends with an amazing statement that can be summarised as "less women can access legal abortions in states that have banned legal abortions". Wow, what an insight.
The reference list is 6, which is pitifully small for any study, and the conflict of interest disclosure is actually larger than the results segment, including one of the writers being in a court case about the matter.
In short, the methods are the equivalent of grabbing a calculator while asking "and how many ovens?". Shit is a fluff piece that they shat out in a day and redditors eat it up.