Deborah Coddington has today written about the Press Council decision upholding complaints against her North & South piece on Asians in NZ. I blogged very briefly on it at the time. I didn't read the N&S article - only Deborah's published defence of it, in which she used this statistic;
Here's a disturbing fact: in 2003 four of every five pregnant Asian women aborted their babies. Do we keep abortion as a last-resort method of birth control, or accept it's a casual approach to contraception?
I pointed out that in 2003 there were 5285 births to Asian mothers and 3502 Asian abortions. So 40 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion (ignoring miscarriages). In 2004 this dropped to 36 percent. Neither figure is anywhere near 80 percent or four in five.
In today's Herald on Sunday column she writes; But the council totally ignored the main complaint - that my statistics were wrong. From this omission, I can only conclude that I was correct all along, and the complainants - as I argued - wilfully used different statistics.
If Deborah used the same statistic in her original article, she made a mistake. She extrapolated the Asian teenage abortion rate to all women. Why not just admit it. I would. 'Fess up and move on. It'll do more for your credibility.
(2005 stats are now available and show a further drop in Asian abortions to 34 percent of pregnancies resulting in birth or abortion - approaching 1 in 3).
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3 comments:
Lindsay, this article may interest you...
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9218127&CFID=4791475&CFTOKEN=86949251
If they change it to requiring a subscription let me know and I'll e-mail it to you.
What stuck out to me was this quote...
"Research also suggests that middle- and working-class parents approach child-rearing in different ways. Professional parents shuttle their kids from choir practice to baseball camp and check that they are doing their homework. They also talk to them more. One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620."
Thanks Eric, Funnily enough I saw your comment just after posting about childcare and children who come from workless homes vs working homes.
The link is incomplete. I'd read something before about the limited vocabulary in welfare homes. Perhaps an argument for returning to more widespread adoption.
Something else as well. Most welfare homes with children are single parent households. Where there is a couple, children hear their adult conservations which enhances their language and comprehension (hopefully:-))
Link's broken eh. Blogger is like that unfortunately.
Just go to economist.com, and type in marriage in the search box at the top of the page. Look for an special report called "The Frayed Knot"
Your point about children hearing humans interacting and not just talking is one I had not picked up on, and is not without merit I think.
The article oes into that sort of thing quite a lot, the young unmarried mother who has never seen her own father and just has no idea of what a proper relationship is supposed to look like.
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