My name is John--and I'm a stats addict

Or so some would say. I do have an insatiable interest in statistics. No, not standard deviations from the mean, the Pearsonian coefficient of skewness--not those kind of statistics (gag!) I mean the kind that show up in box scores on the sports pages, and are derived from market and other kinds of research.

How bad is it? As a young teenager in the early 1960s, being poorer than a church mouse, I devised my own baseball game using the bottom of a Sears box and a plastic spinner from some tabletop game. I would write down various baseball lineups from the paper so that I could have full sets for each major league team, complete with pinch hitters and relief pitchers. On a piece of paper taped to the box, I had I forget how many alternatives that can happen when a pitcher faces a batter--strike, foul, wild pitch, single with runners advancing one base, home run, etc., etc.

I set up a schedule of games, spun the spinner, played nine innings or whatever it took to finish the match, kept statistics of every game, and even compiled tables of leading batters, pitchers, etc. Now the X-Boxes and Playstations do it all for you. No imagination, these young people.

[I was a huge Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves fan. To this day, Hank Aaron is my favourite baseball player. You can imagine what I think of Barry Bonds.]

I suppose that this fascination with statistics is what led me eventually into a career in market research. As I mentioned in an earlier post (Pro-life and....) I love using research to unearth information that clarifies the picture and aids in decision-making.

So you will not be surprised at my delight when I discovered a number of polls done this year in the U.S. and Canada having to do with societal opinions of the life vs. abortion issue. As I have said in the past, stereotypes and myths come crashing down when accurate information is compiled.

I will try to summarize the data from these research efforts in a way that does no violence to their integrity as sources of information. I say this because the questions posed to respondents, while similar, were not necessarily identical, and the samples of respondents, while large and random, were slightly different in some cases (e.g., general sample of Americans vs. registered voters). The polls were done between May and October 2007, most of them in October.

1. Abortion should be legal in all cases (or, it is a sufficient basis for abortion that the baby is unwanted).

Fox News - 39% of Americans
L.A. Times/Bloomberg - 24
CBS News - 26
CNN - 23
Pew Research - 21
Environics Canada - 33% of Canadians (30% of women, 36% of men)

2. Abortion should be legal most of the time; it should be legal in most cases.

L.A. Times/Bloomberg - 19%
Pew Research - 32
CBS News - 16 (more restricted than it is now)
Environics Canada - 11 (support law protecting the fetus after 6 months)
Environics Canada - 21 (support law protecting the fetus after 3 months)

3. Abortion should be illegal with a few exceptions; e.g. only in cases of incest, rape or the mother's life; illegal in most cases.

L.A. Times/Bloomberg - 41%
CBS News - 34
Pew Research - 24
Environics Canada - 47% support public funding for abortion only in such emergencies

4. Abortion should be illegal with no exceptions; never legal; always illegal; illegal in all cases.

L.A. Times/Bloomberg - 12%
CBS News - 4 (another 16% say legal only if woman's life is endangered)
CNN - 22
Pew Research - 15
Environics Canada - 30 (34% of women, 26% of men)

5. Do you consider yourself (more) pro-choice, (more) pro-life, both/mix, unsure?

a. Pro-Life
Fox News - 37%
Gallup - 45
CNN - 50

b. Pro-Choice
Fox News - 48%
Gallup - 49
CNN - 45

c. Both/Mix
Fox News - 8%
Gallup - 3
CNN - 2

d. Don't know/Unsure
Fox News - 7%
Gallup - 4
CNN - 3

6. Do you personally believe having an abortion is wrong?

CNN Yes - 60% No - 36% Unsure - 4%

What can be drawn from this snapshot of societal opinion? Certain trends seem to be indicated.

1. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of North Americans want unrestricted abortion. In Canada there is no abortion law and unrestricted access to abortion, in most cases paid for by the health system, is the current reality. In the U.S. abortion is a constitutional right, although some restrictions exist in most states and many people have to pay for the procedure out of their own pocket.

Despite this open door to abortion access, however, the vast majority of North Americans (two-thirds to three-quarters) would accept (or even prefer) restrictions. In Canada, men are considerably more in favour of unrestricted abortions than women.

2. Abortions related to saving the mother's life or to pregnancies resulting from rape and incest are a very small fraction of total abortions. For all intents and purposes, one could lump together the statistics for making all abortions illegal, and restricting them to extreme cases as mentioned above, to arrive at the statistic for eliminating virtually all abortions. The American respondents in this category fall somewhere between 40 and 50%. Canadian support for public funding for emergency abortions only stands at 47%.

3. Perhaps the most interesting statistic of all indicates that many people who call themselves pro-choice actually mean it in a legal way, while still retaining the moral view that abortion is wrong (what I call the Elizabeth May position). While a little under half of respondents put themselves in the pro-life camp, fully 60% see abortion as immoral.

As for the "every child a wanted child" slogan that so many politicians and abortion advocates use, Fox News found that only 39% favoured abortion because the pregnancy was unwanted, while 50% opposed "unwantedness" as a legitimate basis for abortion (11% were unsure). In other words, for those with an opinion a solid majority reject the common slogan.

Finally, in Canada women are more pro-life than men.