No. 61 - Misquoted Abortion Rate

I heard someone on the radio this morning say that the abortion rate among blacks is 50% - meaning that 1 in every 2 pregnancies results in an abortion. I thought that was a staggering statistics that couldn't possibly be true. A few Google searches later and the best I could determine is that this 50% rate is commonly misquoted. It seems to have been taken from a 2004 CDC Report. If you scroll down to the "Results" section in the report it says:

In the 38 reporting areas for which race was provided, classified according to the same categories used in previous years, approximately 53% of women who obtained legal induced abortions were white; 35%, black; and 8%, other; race was not known for 4%. The abortion ratio for black women (472 per 1,000 live births) was 2.9 times the ratio for white women (161 per 1,000), and the ratio for women of the nonhomogeneous "other" race category (330 per 1,000) was 2.0 times the ratio for white women.

It seems as though some people have a hard time with math and interpreted the "472 per 1,000 live births" to mean 47.2% or almost 50%. However, if there were 1,000 live births and 472 that were never born, the denominator would be 1,472. Therefore 472 divided by 1,472 would result in an abortion rate of 32%. Still a staggering statistic.

I did not learn that you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the radio (or see on television) since I learned that long ago. And whether the above 32% rate is totally accurate today would be subject to further investigation. But I was not aware that the abortion rate for any group of people could have been nearly that high, or even half of that rate.