Teen Vogue spreads bogus information on abortion rights

September 13, 2024

By Tim Worstall

Teen Vogue tells us that “Abortion rights are trans rights.” One of those claims that does not stand up to proper scrutiny.

Yes, we know, it’s an often repeated claim that all rights are the same, that anyone denied any means that all are denied all and so on. But it’s not wholly true. Possibly, one of those things that it’s fashionable to claim rather than something either provable or true.

The headline is:

More Nonbinary People Support Abortion Rights Than Women

That’s definitely not true. The number of nonbinary people is much smaller than the number of women. It’s just not true that support for anything at all will produce more nonbinary people doing so than the number of women.

What Teen Vogue means is that a greater portion, percentage, of nonbinary people than a portion of women think this way. And yes, this is more than pedantry. Because if we’re writing political or sociological pieces for the teen readers of a magazine like Teen Vogue, we owe it to them to be accurate as we do so.

We shouldn’t have to say this but we’ll do so anyway. This, this piece by us, is not about abortion. Nor is it about nonbinary or any other variation of gender and or sex. Everyones’ got opinions on both and that’s not what this is about. Rather, the misuse of polling and statistics to tell a misleading story. We are, after all, Accuracy in Media so it’s accuracy we think and worry about.

The survey this is drawn from is here. The full data tables are here.

Now one part of what Teen Vogue say about the survey on abortion is:

The report found that a majority of all people believe that abortion should be legal all or most of the time,

And that’s not really true. There are considerable differences in circumstances. As we’d expect, greater support for incest, fetal abnormality, mother’s health, earlier in gestation and so on. It’s entirely possible to read exactly the same numbers as saying “For women who do not wish to be pregnant“ that less than a majority support it. Because the number who do support that is 43%.

Again, our point is not what is right or wrong for public policy. It’s how statistics are being manipulated.

This brings us to the point about trans that Teen Vogue ran with as the subheadline. That’s very difficult to support. The survey doesn’t break out trans at all. It has a category for “nonbinary,” which isn’t the same thing.

But the really useful thing about reading the actual numbers is that nonbinary is 177 people out of a total survey of 20,762. This isn’t a useful breaking down of attitudes, not when we’re trying to assume something about 360 million Americans from 177 people.

Small sample sizes, claims about prevalence that aren’t wholly correct? Do better, Teen Vogue.

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