Tag Archives: Docs: Studies

Washington Post: Nearly three months later, a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has completed a close examination of how the media covered the issue. The principal finding? Detractors of gay marriage couldn’t buy their way into the coverage. Well, that’s the unscientific way of putting things.

Boston Globe: Counterfactuals play a big role in the abortion debate in general, and perhaps the biggest question of all is how abortion rates would change if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe. There is no way to know the answer to that for sure, but a trio of researchers recentlydeveloped a good estimate using abortion data from New York State in the years immediately before and after the 1973 Roe decision. | Michael New has a couple of related posts at National Review: If Roe Were Overturned . . . and Predicting the Abortion Rate in a Post-Roe world.

BBC: A record 40% of US homes with children relied on mothers as their main or only source of income, a Pew survey found.

Huffington Post: Seventy-two percent of African-American children are raised in single-parent households, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And while the impact of single-parenthood, which reportedly entered the public consciousness around 1965, can be seen in performance at school, rates of imprisonment and poverty, and drug use, regardless of race, a new study by researchers at Rice University says the consequences of living with an unwed mother has expanded into another area — children’s waistlines.

Filistrucchi, Lapo and Prufer, Jens, Nonprofits are Not Alike: The Role of Catholic and Protestant Affiliation (April 26, 2013). TILEC Discussion Paper No. 2013-013. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2259051 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2259051

LiveScience: “This is because traditional economic models of marriage have argued that men who have high earning potential are more likely to marry at an older age so that they can ‘reveal’ their high potential,” explained Hani Mansour, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver. [I Don't: 5 Myths About Marriage]

LifeSiteNews: Almost 60 premature babies are born with cerebral palsy in England and Wales every year because their mothers had previous abortions. This is because 15% of babies born before 28 weeks develop cerebral palsy and 400 premature births before 28 weeks each year are attributable to abortion. 15% of 400 is 60. This calculation is based on the studies below.

NPR: More than 23,600 people were victims of human trafficking in Europe during a recent three-year period, according to a new European Union report that says the problem is growing worse. Its authors say the official figures do not come close to describing the crime . . .

Iona Institute: The study titled “Does abortion reduce the mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy? A re-appraisal of the evidence” was published in the April edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

Religion Clause Blog: Earlier this week, the Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life released two related studies. The first, titled Applying God’s Law: Religious Courts and Mediation in the U.S. surveys the routine operation of religious courts across the United States. The second is titled State Legislation Restricting Use of Foreign or Religious Law.

Investor’s Business Daily: Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center . . . The freest state overall, the researchers concluded, was North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. The least free state by far was New York, followed by California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island
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Charisma News: A new report released Tuesday finds that Americans overwhelmingly believe morals and values are declining in the U.S. (77 percent). The most-cited cause for the decline? A lack of Bible reading. The findings are reported in the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible survey released Tuesday

Washington Post: Delaying marriage can increase the economic fortunes of educated women, according to “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America.” The new report was sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and the Relate Institute.

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: Today’s Times reports on a new Third Way study that is highly important–no sarcasm here–and that picks up on some of this column’s frequent themes. Here’s the abstract . . .

LifeNews: A new study has found that women with a history of induced abortion were more likely to experience metabolic syndrome compared to women who had never had abortions, increasing their risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and stroke.

Windy City Times: A network of conservative Christian organizations has successfully fought pro-choice and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) civil rights legislation by claiming that such policies infringe on “religious liberty,” according to a major new report released today. The report, by Dr. Jay Michaelson, Religious Liberty Fellow at Political Research Associates (PRA), is entitled Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights . . . Key players in reframing the debate include the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). According to the report, these organizations, supported by Catholic organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, aim “not simply to win religious exemptions to the law, but to contest the authority of secular law itself.” They are allied with such conservative evangelical organizations as Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom . . . The report is available for download here www.politicalresearch.org/resources/reports/full-reports/redefining-religious-liberty/ . | Larger report on the same topic available at ValleyNewsLive via PR Newswire: As New Pope Inaugurated, New Report Exposes Catholic Church’s and Right’s ‘Religious Liberty’ Campaign Against Gay, Reproductive Rights

International Business Times: Researchers from the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine have just released a study in which they declared that the cultural preference for sons over daughters is even more of an intractable problem in Nepal than …

SCOTUS Blog: We present the results of a new study, which offers significant methodological improvements over past studies by combining experimental and observational elements . . . We found that even when ruling on highly controversial and politicized issues – such as the health care and immigration rulings we considered – the Supreme Court can change public opinion.

Albert Mohler: The moral effects of pornography are, by now, well attested. The scourge of pornography has brought ruin and harm into the lives of millions of our friends and neighbors, destroying marriages, distorting sexuality, and poisoning minds. Even so, the pornography industrial complex continues to grow, representing one of the most lucrative segments of the Internet economy.

WorldNetDaily: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported Feb. 27 the rate of metastatic breast cancer in women ages 25 to 39 nearly doubled between 1976 and 2009, from 1.53 to 2.9 per 100,000. The American Council on Science and Health calls the increase “slight.” But Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, points out there has been no corresponding increase in older women. | Incidence of Breast Cancer With Distant Involvement Among Women in the United States, 1976 to 2009, Rebecca H. Johnson, MD; Franklin L. Chien, BA; Archie Bleyer, MD
JAMA. 2013;309(8):800-805. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.776.

LifeSiteNews: A new study commissioned by the Vitae Foundation has taken a careful scientific approach to identify what drives women’s decisions to keep their child, place a child in adoption or abort one’s child. The study has determined what influences that decision, which women are most reachable, what message is most likely to reach them and from whom vulnerable women would like to hear that message. | A New Understanding of the Trauma of Abortion

LifeSiteNews: Much of the data revealed in this report supports the research published by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute. For example, data published by MARRI highlights the association between living in an intact, married family and higher GPAs in school. – See more at: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-research-shows-all-north-american-children-in-two-parent-homes-do-bette#sthash.EoTjf1Lj.dpuf

Reuters on Yahoo: Gay and lesbian couples living together report poorer health than straight married couples, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday, speculating that legalizing same-sex marriage could reduce the disparities.

Houston Family Attorney Blog: The Daily News points to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which engaged couples and co-habiting couples had as much success in their marriage as those who had not lived together prior to marriage. Some of these couples made it to the 15-year mark in marriage. But research was not so positive about non-engaged couples who were living together before getting hitched.

LifeSiteNews: Dr. Arie Perliger, director of terrorism studies at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), makes the allegation in his report, “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.” The document – which references abortion 76 times in 146 pages – was issued in November but only reported last month.

Christian Institute: Children whose parents divorce after they turn seven are more likely to misbehave and perform badly at school, according to a new Government-funded study.

LifeSiteNews: – Despite a substantial increase in HIV testing at sexually transmitted infection clinics in the UK, there has been no decline in HIV incidence among homosexuals in England and Wales, according to a new study.

Cynthia Davis at Townhall: We now live in a time where social welfare incentives have engendered unprecedented numbers of unmarried parents, causing record deficits. The inability to address this issue has politically-hobbled every Republican president since Reagan. Our government needs to take responsibility for creating this monster and start on a new path of adopting policies that are good for families.

Center for Military Readiness report.

Zenit (links to study): The negative social consequences of divorce are well-known but a new report shows that it also leads to a decline in religious practice. On Wednesday the Institute for American Values published the findings of a group of scholars in a report titled “Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith?: Challenging the Churches to Confront the Impact of Family Change.” Every year about a million children in the United States experience the divorce of their parents, the report pointed out, and overall one-quarter of young adults come from divorced families.

LifeNews: A new report from Americans United for Life, that monitors changes to pro-life laws on abortion and bioethics and end-of-life issues named Louisiana the most pro-life state in the nation. Washington state came in at the bottom of the list of 50 states on abortion.

Dallas Morning News: A report from the Texas Freedom Network claims the failure to implement a 2007 law that included guidelines to improve the quality of Bible study courses has resulted in factual errors and “blatant religious bias” in the courses.

LifeSiteNews: A new study of Canadian women finds that pregnant women who are married suffer less partner abuse, substance abuse, and post-partum depression than women who are cohabitating or single. Dr. Marcelo Urquia, an epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto . . .

Mercator.net: Research showing problems with homosexual parenting continues to grow with the release of a study showing that the children of heterosexual couples are more likely to progress in primary school than children from a same-sex household. The study, “Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress Through School: A Comment on Rosenfeld”, is a re-examination of a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld of Stanford University’s Department of Sociologypublished in 2010. The new study, led by Douglas W Allen, and published by the academic journal Demography, found that the children from a heterosexual household are “35 percent more likely to make typical school progress”.

Washington Times: The disappearance of marriage in “middle America” is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, and “strikes at the very heart of the American Dream,” scholars Elizabeth Marquardt, David Blankenhorn, Robert I. Lerman, Linda Malone-Colon and W. Bradford Wilcox said in a paper released Sunday. They offer 10 recommendations to President Obama and other policymakers to renew a marriage culture.

LifeSiteNews: A study of the impact of legalized prostitution has found that countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows than countries in which prostitution is prohibited. Professor Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a team of researchers analyzed data on human trafficking from a global sample of 116 countries in order to determine what effect a country’s domestic policy on prostitution has on trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims.

CBS: A study by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has found that large parts of the city are plagued with soaring rates for multiple STDs – including HIV/AIDS.

Heritage Foundation: Primary schoolchildren in married heterosexual households are 35 percent more likely to make typical school progress than peers in same-sex households, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in the respected academic journal Demography.

Religion Clause Blog (links to the report and more): The Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations this week issued its first report to Sen. Charles Grassley.

Christian Post: A new study from Australia showed that women who underwent an abortion were more likely to struggle with substance abuse than those women who did not have an abortion. Results of the study were made public by Kaeleen Dingle, of the University of Queensland, during a recent conference of the World Psychiatric Association in Melbourne.

LifeSiteNews: While pro-life activists have welcomed a CDC study reporting that the abortion rate dropped 5% in 2009, they have also highlighted a more disturbing statistic that has received little to no media coverage. According to the CDC study, 12 women died from complications related to legal abortion in 2008 – double the number of the previous year.

Courier Press: A report researched by a group of Indiana University students finds that 614 laws in Indiana provide rights or responsibilities to Hoosiers based on marriage and family, which could make them unavailable to same-sex couples under a proposed constitutional amendment.

Michael J. New at National Review: Last week, a number of media outlets including Slate and the Huffington Post were eagerly promoting a new study about women who were denied abortions. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco are conducting a “turnaway” study where they track the experiences of women who were unable to obtain abortions due to gestational age of their unborn child. The preliminary results indicate that women who were denied abortions were more likely to be suffering from both stress and economic hardship than women who were able to obtain abortions. However, the mainstream media is missing several important details

Atlanta J. Constitution: A study shows the number of abortions in Iowa hasn’t increased since doctors were allowed starting in 2008 to prescribe an abortion-inducing drug via a remote-controlled system to patients in rural areas, The Des Moines Register reported Friday.

Mark Regnerus at National Review: This month yielded yet another published study — which received positive media attention — based on the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. The NLLFS is about to enter its third decade of following the same 78 respondents, who were “planned” and born to lesbian mothers employing artificial reproductive technology; in nearly all the families studied, the children were being raised by their biological mother and her partner. While any sociologist worth his or her degree can appreciate the laborious task of keeping track of and reinterviewing the same group of people over many years, this particular data-collection effort probably ought to be retired. And yet it continues to appear in peer-reviewed journal articles in the health and social sciences. What exactly is the NLLFS and why do I say it should be retired?

Christian Post: A Danish study that was recently published showed that women who had undergone at least one abortion saw an increase in maternal death rate of 45 percent. The study, “Reproductive history patterns and long-term mortality rates: a Danish, population-based record linkage study,” was published in the European Journal of Public Health and looked at the maternal death rates of women in Denmark, over a 25 year period, who had under gone an abortion or experienced a during pregnancy.

Christian Institute: Children suffer through to adulthood after their parents divorce, a new study has revealed . . . The report also warned about the consequences of changes to the traditional family structure of one mum and one dad . . . The report, which was funded by the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council, found the long-term damage of divorce on children was the same across different generations.

CBS: A new study has found that 17-year-olds with lesbian mothers had high school GPAs ranging between A-minus to B-plus, while having strong family bonds with their mothers, whom the teens consider good role models. The Williams Institute at UCLA, which conducted “Adolescents with Lesbian Mothers Describe Their Own Lives,” tracked 78 adolescents over a 26-year period. | UCLA Williams Institute Study

Christian Institute: Research shows 59% of youngsters wish they could spend more time with their mum and dad. The study from the Family and Parenting Institute also shows that one in eight parents admitted to only giving their children their full attention “once or twice a week.”

Matthew J. Franck at National Review: Regnerus’s research exploded the “no differences” thesis to which advocates of same-sex marriage have clung–that is, the thesis that children do just as well being raised by parents in such relationships as they do being raised by their own biological, married parents who stay together for the long haul. Furious at his dissent from their unwarranted “consensus,” Regnerus’s critics lashed out at him with everything from reasonable (but misplaced) criticisms of his research to vicious attacks on him as a person. One of the more temperate critics of Regnerus has been David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values . . .

Mark Regnerus, Parental same-sex relationships, family instability, and subsequent life outcomes for adult children: Answering critics of the new family structures study with additional analyses | Volume 41, Issue 6, Social Science Research, November 2012, Pages 1367–1377

Matthew J. Franck at Public Discourse: Mark Regnerus’s response to his critics shows more clearly that instability is characteristic of same-sex relationships and that stable same-sex parented households are virtually non-existent. Second of a two-part series.

Matthew J. Franck at Public Discourse: Attacks on sociologist Mark Regnerus after he challenged the “no differences” thesis haven’t obscured the high quality of the New Family Structures Study or its troubling findings. The first of a two-part series.

FoodConsumer.org: Women who have had an induced abortion may have to face a drastically increased risk of developing breast cancer, according to A.R. Jiang of Jiangsu Province Institute of Cancer Research in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China and colleagues who reported in Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention, which associates induced abortion with elevated risk of breast cancer.

LifeSiteNews: UCLA researchers presented findings from their study, titled, “Congenital Malformations Associated With Assisted Reproductive Technology: A California Statewide Analysis,” on October 20 at theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics National Conference in New Orleans.

CBS: The vast majority of homemade pornography and private images on personal computers ends up on public websites called “parasites.”
Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study from Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found. | Internet Watch Foundation press release

Edge on the Net: A new study claims that bisexual women and gay men suffer higher rates of domestic violence, according to the Williams Institute, a gay think tank associated with the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reuters: Legal limits and social pressures against religion have risen to the point where three-quarters of the world’s population live in states where practicing their faith is restricted in some way, a new study said on Thursday.

Cato Institute Tax and Budge Bulletin #65: We find that the U.S. effective tax rate on new corporate investment is 35.6 percent in 2012, which is almost twice the average rate for the 90 countries studied, and it is also the highest rate among the major industrial nations. These results underscore the need for U.S. policymakers to tackle corporate tax reform.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: The 2012 State Liability Systems Ranking Study was conducted for the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform to explore how fair and reasonable the states’ tort liability systems are perceived to be by U.S. businesses.

Peter Sprigg at LifeSiteNews: Because the study undermined the politically correct claim that such children are “no different” from children with heterosexual parents, and because it reinforced a key point made in defense of the natural definition of marriage as the union of man and woman (namely, that kids need both a mom and a dad), it became urgent for pro-homosexual activists to discredit the study and, if possible, destroy Regnerus.

Palm Center (includes link to the study): The first academic study of the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) has found that the new policy of open service has had no overall negative impact on military readiness, unit cohesion, recruitment, retention or morale, according to a new story on the Huffington Post.

Ken McIntyre at Heritage Foundation Culture Watch: The collapse of marriage, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty—but government policy doesn’t reflect that reality, according to a special report released yesterday by The Heritage Foundation.

Christian Concern: The report, published in the Journal Human Reproduction, claimed that the overall risk was still low, even though the data showed that women were three times more likely to have a very premature baby (born before 28 weeks) if they had previously had 3 or more abortions.

Catholic Culture: Dr. Thomas Hilgers, a Creighton University obstetrics professor and director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, has revealed that statistics show women are less likely to become pregnant when they are raped than when they engage in consensual intercourse.

Brian Fung at The Atlantic: The Quiet Racism of Abortion Bans
What would happen if the GOP got its way and control over abortion rights were returned to the states? A new study by researchers at Yale University and the City University of New York, published in NBER,imagines how overturning Roe v. Wade might play out . . . But whatever you make of those topline numbers, one thing seems certain: an abortion ban would disproportionately affect women from non-white and low-income backgrounds.

Volokh Conspiracy: At the risk of provoking the ire of anti-circumcision zealots (you know who are), I thought I’d mention that the American Academy of Pediatrics, reversing a previous neutral stance, is now endorsing male circumcision based on a review of recent scientific evidence.

CNA: A report examining court cases from recent years has found that hostility towards religion has grown to unprecedented levels in the United States. The newly-updated Survey of Religious Hostility in America serves as “a testament to the radical shift in our culture’s worldview” on religion, said Kelly Shackelford, president of Liberty Institute, and Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council.

Religion Clause Blog: In Denmark, the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for European Islamic Thought this month published a 234-page study titled Danish Regulation of Religion, State of Affairs and Qualitative Reflections

One News Now: The joint study from Liberty Institute and the Family Research Council (FRC) records up to 600 incidents of hostility toward religion, most of which have occurred within the last ten years.

AP: The study released Monday by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found that residents in states where religious participation is higher than the rest of the nation, particularly in the South, gave the greatest percentage . . .

TheLeader.info: According to a recent study, infants conceived with the techniques used in fertility clinics are four times more likely to have certain birth defects and malformations than children that are naturally conceived.

CNSNews: People who drop out of high school and get a job with the federal government earn, on average, 36 percent more in wages and benefits than their dropout counterparts in the private sector, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) . . .In the report, Comparing Compensation for Federal and Private-Sector Workers: An Overview,

Christian Institute: Researchers watched dads interacting with their infants at three months and then assessed the same babies’ behaviour at twelve months.They found that babies whose dads were more engaged at three months had fewer problems when assessed at twelve months . . . The study of 192 families was published in the journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Religion Clause Blog: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom last Friday released a new report titled The Religion-State Relationship & the Right to Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Comparative Textual Analysis of the Constitutions of Majority Muslim Countries and Other OIC Members.  It surveys the constitutions of 46 Muslim-majority countries and 10 others that are OIC members. According to USIRF’ssummary of the report . . .