“Rock” Group’s Rocky Research

Enraged by the supposed GOP “war on women,” 56-year-old mother of two Susan McMillan Emry decided to take action. Emry has created “Rock the Slut Vote,” a website focused on uniting women like herself who feel hurt or angered by the GOP effort to “bully, subjugate and silence women.” The website shows women how to register to vote, provides examples of angry letters to send to their government representatives, and attempts to combat “conservative propaganda.”

The Rock the Slut Vote website attempts to expose GOP “propaganda” with specific studies and research. But where does this “research” originate? The Guttmacher Institute(GI), better known as Planned Parenthood’s research organization arm is the website’s only reference for its data, charts and studies. The organization supports legalized abortions and reproductive rights, and offers questionable statistics in trying to prove that legalized abortion is the safest and best option available for women.

The Guttmacher Institute has quite a history of producing obviously flawed and exaggerated studies. In 2008, the organization may have overestimated induced abortion rates in Colombia, by nearly 18 times more than may have actually occurred. There was no exact confirmation of this data, because it would be virtually impossible to confirm, due to the lack of technology and communication access in such poor countries.

Another study sparked major controversy within the Catholic Church, when GI claimed that 98% of “all Catholic women” have used contraception at some point in their lives. The survey was limited to a specific age group (15-44), excluded any women not sexually active, postpartum, pregnant, or trying to get pregnant. Thus, the study was limited only to Catholic women avoiding an unintended pregnancy, a very small portion of “all” Catholic women.

As Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute said, The Guttmacher Institute is “deliberately exaggerating the magnitude of the problem in order to create a ‘health crisis’ to justify legalizing abortion-on-demand.”

Sara Cummings is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

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