It’s time to go whomping some dodgy statistics again, and our target for today is one that’s starting to crop up pretty regularly in commentaries on UK abortion law. You’ll find it in this fairly recent Guardian article by Caroline Criado-Perez: Polls show 62% of the British public […]

If you’ve already read the introductory article then you’ll be aware that the starting point for this entire investigation is a series of articles published by the Daily Telegraph in February 2014 which stemmed from an undercover investigation into the “counselling” practices of a self-styled “Crisis Pregnancy Centre” […]

In February 2014, the Daily Telegraph published a series of extremely disturbing articles based on an undercover investigation of a small number of self-styled “Crisis Pregnancy” Centres. The centrepiece of this investigation was a video lasting just under one and half minutes which showed a dark-haired young women […]

This was going to be quite a straightforward article. After all, how difficult could it be to dismantle the latest banal and ill-conceived witterings of Nadine Dorries, the sitting MP for the constituency of Mid-Narnia, on the subject of abortion and abortion law? But then I ran into […]

Sometimes it’s not so much what newspapers print as what they don’t print that matters. Last week, for example, the Department of Health published what was supposedly “new” guidance on sex-selective abortion, if a simple restatement of the existing legal position, which remains entirely unchanged, can actually be […]

Harry G Frankfurt’s classic monograph “On Bullshit” begins with a very simple but striking observation: One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. There is indeed and much of it is, sadly, to be found on the pages of national […]

Over at the Daily Telegraph Max Pemberton, who’s also a doctor, has written an opinion piece on abortion which, amongst other things, neatly illustrates the kind of problems that can easily arise if you’re gullible enough to believe everything you read in the newspapers. The problems with Pemberton’s […]

Even by my own standards this is a long article at a little over 14,000 words including references. The main subject of the article is a recent Chinese ‘ABC’ (Abortion-Breast Cancer) study, a meta-analysis of 36 studies looking at the relationship between induced abortion and women’s risk of […]

I’ve never been one to leave a job half done so for this article I’m heading back to The Independent’s grossly overheated and incompetently executed ‘Lost Girls’ story to finish off the job I started last week by looking, albeit rather obliquely, at the two comment piece that […]

Okay, quick recap: Yesterday, The Independent Newspaper published an article by its Science Editor, Steve Connor, in which its purports to have uncovered evidence of what it claims to be widespread use of illegal sex-selective abortions by ‘some UK ethnic groups’, all based on a bespoke data set […]