Item 35643

Like Scott Wickstein in the comments to this post at Troppo Armadillo I so wasn't going to get into the debate on Tony Abbott's recent posturings on abortion. I especially wasn't going to go anywhere near Abbott's claim that Australia currently has an “epidemic” of abortions with 100,000 abortions performed a year. No way known was I interested in checking his figures to see how accurate they were.

I absolutely refused to waste any time googling up the Health Insurance Commission to get figures on the number of abortions funded by Medicare. No way was I going to use the HIC's online report generator to extract data for the years 1994 to 2003. So I can't tell you that the average number of Medicare funded abortions each year between 1994 and 2003 was about 25,000 short of Abbott's figure.

Not only that, but I steadfastly refused to do any data analysis, not even the sort of cursory data analysis you can do with the statistical functions of a standard spreadsheet program. So I'm absolutely not going to claim that the trend, if any, has been for the annual number of abortions to decline slightly.

It's just a bunch of pointless facts that are totally irrelevant to Abbott's position. So why should anyone give a rat's arse?