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Who was it who said that there are lies and there are egregious lies and then there are statistics?

It's not true that you can make numbers say anything you want, but you can spin your numbers or you can ignore certain aspects of your numbers,

the data that you yourself collect, and that might be true here of the new Gutmacher Institute's report that was recently published in the journal Demography.

Joining us to talk about this new data from the Gutmacher Institute on unintended pregnancy rates and on pregnancy desires.

Dr. Michael knew visiting a assistant professor of social research and political science at the Catholic University of America.

He's Senior Associate Scholar for the Charlotte Loser Institute, Paige Comstock, Cunningham Fellow with Americans United for Life,

and a columnist for National Review Online. Dr. New, welcome back.

Thanks for having me. Much appreciated.

What is the subject or what are the subjects of the latest Gutmacher Institute numbers published in Demography?

Sure. Gutmacher, from time to time, cracks data in the US on pregnancy rates and pregnancy desires, whether pregnancies were intended or unintended.

And this article, kind of updates that data, provides new data from the year 2009 to 2015.

How did Gutmacher's methodology in this report differ from their previous reports on pregnancy desires?

A little bit more nuanced. A previous Gutmacher reports kind of lumped all pregnancies into one of three categories either wanted, unwanted, or mistimed.

Here, they broke it down to more categories. They looked at pregnancies that were too early, pregnancies that occurred on time, pregnancy that occurred too late, and then another category of unwanted pregnancies.

So they broke it down to more categories. This report was a bit more nuanced.

What are pregnancy desires? What is that data point?

Essentially, you know, there are surveys that ask women about their pregnancies, and they simply ask, you know, was this pregnancy intended or was it circumstances?

Or you intend to get pregnant? Did this pregnancy occur? What do you wanted? Did it occur later than you wanted?

Was it unwanted? Again, they used data from the National Survey of Family Growth. That's a data set that's, you know, very widely used by social scientists who want to track, you know, a variety of findings and trends about the family.

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