Study Claims Abortion Restrictions Are Linked To Suicide — But Ignores Crucial Data Showing Otherwise

The authors fail to recognize a significant portion of the data, they are biased with the data they have, and they don’t control for obvious state-level confounders.

The study that suggests abortion restrictions are likely to cause suicide is highly flawed.

JAMA Psychiatry publishes at the end of each year a study The assertion that abortion restrictions cause suicide is a falsehood. Although many academic papers are not read or cited behind paywalls and remain uncited, this paper was promoted immediately in various media outlets, including The Guardian, NBC News?, and The Hill.

The study’s results were politically relevant — the authors claimed abortion restrictions raised suicide rates of young women by more than 5 percent. The University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine were the authors. JAMA Psychiatry is also affiliated. one of the world’s most influential psychiatry journals. If restrictions are relatively light from the Roe v. Wade The era could lead to suicide among young women, and suicide would spike if certain states imposed abortion bans. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization?

However, the paper is flawed. The paper is flawed because the authors are missing a lot of data. Although data claimed to be unavailable from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), is actually available. This leads to a biased estimate of suicide rates and poor statistical controls.

Drawing conclusions after discarding half of the data

The authors’ basic strategy was to look at the suicide rates of young women by state and year and compare them to abortion restrictions across states and years. The suicide rate of young women who have abortion providers in their jurisdiction is 5 percent higher for the time period 1976 to 2016. The suicide rate for young women who have been impacted by abortion policies is also higher in the period 2006-2017, as shown by a weighted indicator of abortion policy. Because the authors find no relationship between abortion restrictions and suicide among older women nor with motor vehicle deaths, they reason it’s likely that restricting abortion increases suicide among young women who might wish to receive one.

The majority of the data needed to perform their analysis was missing, according to the authors. The authors’ Table 1 paper contains data from 50 states, 1976 to 2016. If all of the data was available there would be 2,050 data points or observations on suicide rates among women between 20 and 34 years old in every state. There are 1,022 observations. This is approximately half of the relevant observations.

Data are not missing observations randomly. The online supplemental materials contain suicide rate data by state and year. Here are the missing observations for each year.

Author’s calculations using Table 3 from study’s supplemental material compared to CDC’s Wonder database.

Why does data availability drop? The CDC has been around for many years. suppresses “[s]ub—national statistics representing fewer than ten persons” For privacy reasons.

The number of young suicides

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases