Tag Archives: Topic: Studies

Reuters: Birth and abortion rates among U.S. teens fell to record lows in 2008 as increased use of contraceptives sent the overall teen pregnancy rate to its lowest level since at least 1972, a study showed on Wednesday.

LifeNews.com: he new study repeats the same discredited practice of simply comparing nationally reported maternal mortality rates with Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported deaths associated with abortion. Sounds reasonable, until you learn that there is no accurate or formal mechanism for reporting abortion-related deaths.

LifeNews.com: As thousands were on the national mall in Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, Reuters reported on a study that suggests abortion is safer than giving birth. I find it odd that the release of such a study was timed to coincide with an event that celebrates and vows to protect the sanctity of life.

Ruth Institute Blog: Likewise, the media frequently fails to report the whole picture by reporting on insufficient studies on gay or lesbian parenting. The latest reporting of the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study pertaining to lesbian mothers (http://www.nllfs.org/images/uploads/pdf/nllfs-quality-life-january-2012.pdf) continues this trend.

Reuters: Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

Maggie Gallagher at Townhall: Men and women really are different. Not only our bodies, but our brains react differently. Suppressing reality in the interests of ideology doesn’t help women — it just makes us all act in dumber and dumber ways.

MyHealthNewsDaily.com: In terms of health, self-esteem, and psychological well-being, marriage offers little benefit over simply living together without wedding rings, the study found. It’s the relationship itself, rather than its official status, that’s key to its benefits, said study researcher Kelly Musick, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology. | Musick, K. and Bumpass, L. (2012), Reexamining the Case for Marriage: Union Formation and Changes in Well-being. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74: 1–18. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2011.00873.x

LifeNews.com: The national pro-life legislative group Americans United for Life has released its seventh annual ranking of states across the country based on the way each deals with a comprehensive list of life issues – from abortion to euthanasia.

Doctors Lounge: In the study in the January issue of the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 78 teens with lesbian mothers living in the United States took an online survey about their quality of life. The researchers compared these with surveys completed by teens with heterosexual parents. | Study available for purchase online – abstract here.

NCPA Policy Digest: Cancer patients on Medicaid survive less time after their diagnosis than people with private or no insurance, data from Ohio show.

AZ Policy Blog: Another study has been released on the harms of divorce. This one from the University of Arizona shows that divorced men and women may die earlier than married individuals.

Glenn T. Staunton at National Review: This was the stated criteria for inclusion in the study. But there are very few same-sex homes where both married parents are the adoptive parents. And confine that small number to only those in Massachusetts, and you could probably fit them in a mini van. As Greg Scott of the Alliance Defense Fund explains, that means Minnery was indeed correct about 99.9999 percent and Franken caught him on a snarky 0.00001 percent technicality that he turned into a laugh-line.

News from The Associated Press: A new study of fertility treatment found that women who get three or more embryos have no better odds of having a baby than those who get just two embryos.

CBC News: Scientists at the University of Turin and the University of Manchester say they have developed a new method to analyze personality differences between the sexes, which suggests the differences are much greater than previously thought.

Christian Today: The UK had the second highest teen abortion rates at a rate of 22.1 per cent, and it has also been reported that a quarter of all abortions in the UK are from teenagers, according to Mail Online.

Education News: Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business analysed school suspension rates among boys and girls in the US. They also used surveys of parents and teachers relating to children’s cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development.

The Marriage Economy: ‘I Couldn’t Afford To Get Divorced’ : NPR (includes audio): As unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent.

UN.org: The report, released today by the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, outlines “a pattern of human rights violations… that demands a response,” and says governments have too often overlooked violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Fox News: In other words, Pew’s 51% of unmarried Americans includes a very large number of “not-yet-married” Americans. In fact, what’s striking about Americans is that unlike folks in other developed countries, they still get married if you just give them some time.

BBC News: The number of visits by gay men to health clinics dropped significantly after same-sex unions were allowed in the state Massachusetts. This was regardless of whether the men were in a stable relationship, reported the American Journal of Public Health.

Telegraph: The Health Survey for England found that men reported having 9.3 different partners on average, with a quarter of men boasting of more than 10 conquests.

Barely half of all adults in the United States — a record low — are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides . . .

The Washington Post: Two-fifths of high school students graduate prepared neither for traditional college nor for career training, according to a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona.

LifeNews.com: Last month, LifeNews reported on a new study published by scientists who examined diabetes mellitus type 2, reproductive factors, and breast cancer — finding a statistically significant association showing a 2.86-fold increased breast cancer risk from one or more induced abortions.

News from The Associated Press: Among women with unwanted pregnancies, those who had abortions were no more likely to suffer from problems including anxiety or depression than women who gave birth, the analysis by the U.K.’s National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health found.

NYTimes.com: From tribesmen to billionaire philanthropists, the social value of generosity is already well known. But new research suggests it also matters much more intimately than we imagined, even down to our most personal relationships. esearchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women.

Elizabeth Marquardt & W. Bradford Wilcox at The Atlantic: These modern day portraits of parenthood raise vital questions: Do women and men today experience parenthood differently depending on whether they are married or unmarried? And, if they are married, is parenthood itself an obstacle to a good marriage? In a new report “When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable” (PDF), just published in the latest issue of the State of Our Unions, we examined nationally-representative survey data, including a new, nationally-representative study of more than 1,400 married couples (18-46), to respond to these questions.

UPI.com: Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say.

LifeNews.com: The study, led by Lilit Khachatryan, included researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania. Khachatryan is from the Department of Public Health, American University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia; Robert Scharpfb is from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Sarah Kagan is from the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Religion Clause: Yesterday, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a new report titled Lobbying for the Faithful: Religious Advocacy Groups in Washington D.C.

Herald Tribune: Women who have had ovarian stimulation to produce eggs for in vitro fertilization are at slightly increased risk for a type of ovarian cancer, a large study has found.

OneNewsNow.com: A spokesman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says his organization’s new study on the family should shock the nation.

LifeSiteNews.com: The report, titled ‘”Not to be Forgotten: Care of Vulnerable Canadians,’” calls for “quality end-of-life care for all Canadians.”

FRC: Tomorrow, Family Research Council’s Marriage & Religion Research Institute (MARRI) will release its second annual Index of Family Belonging and Rejection. The first Index found that less than 50 percent of American children reach adulthood having grown up in an intact family

Guimerà R, Sales-Pardo M (2011) Justice Blocks and Predictability of U.S. Supreme Court Votes. PLoS ONE 6(11): e27188. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027188
Successful attempts to predict judges’ votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a justice’s vote based on the other justices’ votes in the same case.

Catholic Culture: Researchers at the Arizona State University have linked the hormone in Depo Provera to memory loss. The birth-control shot can act as an abortifacient as well as a contraceptive.

Andrew Haines at Public Discourse: Bryan Caplan’s latest book argues that we don’t need to over-invest time and money on our kids, because our lasting influence on their characters is negligible, while their contribution to our material well-being is significant.

LifeNews.com: The paper, titled ‘Associations Between Abortion, Mental Disorders, and Suicidal Behaviour in a Nationally Representative Sample’ was published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in April 2010 and confirmed ‘a strong association between abortion and mental disorders’.

Yahoo! News: So who is paying? The new study — by New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and the Justice at Stake Campaign, a non-partisan reform group — found that a small group of super spenders plays the biggest role, using their money to buy the kind of judges they want hearing their cases.

W. Bradford Wilcox . . . talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy

LifeSiteNews.com: However, a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that supply-side strategies — strategies aimed at reducing the number of abortion providers — also have promise for lowering abortion rates

The Hill: The 22-page report from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) concludes that married couples will get only 14 percent of the law’s tax credits, even as more than 7 million mostly single people cease paying income taxes altogether.

Baptist Press: A major seven-year study published in a mainstream journal is challenging the secular notion that gays and lesbians cannot change their sexual orientation.

AFA of Indiana: However, a new study looking back over the last fifty years has found that the bottom may now be falling out of church attendance among white middle class Americans. The scholarly study from sociologists at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia called, No Money, No Honey, No Church, has found that low or moderately educated white middle class Americans are abandoning church.

LifeNews.com: In 1996, the Brind quantitative meta-analysis of the extant induced abortion and breast cancer studies showed that there were 23 studies, 10 of which were statistically significant. Since then, there has been no tabulation to include the studies after 1997. An unpublished review in 2003 showed that there were 40 studies which showed a positive association between induced abortion and breast cancer.

LifeSiteNews.com: According to a report published in the international journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, current ultrasound scan guidelines used to determine if a women has had a miscarriage are inadequate and unreliable, and following these guidelines may result in healthy and wanted pregnancies being aborted.

SMH.com.au: Serious and fatal diseases such as pancreatic cancer, Parkinson’s disease and diabetes may eventually be treated using stem cells from breast milk following a remarkable discovery at the University of Western Australia.

Rebecca Hagelin at Townhall : A new study by researchers at the University of Washington found that “supermoms” (women who project the image—and believe the myth—that they can juggle children, home, husband, career and volunteer work with perfection) end up more depressed than other moms.

Cassandra Hough at Public Discourse: An “adaptationist” approach to pornography is dangerous because it ignores widespread research showing that pornography harms society at many levels.

The Guardian: A small Spanish biological research company was deluged with queries after reports that its blood test could predict the age you would die. Well, can it?

Stanford School of Medicine: U.S. policy prohibiting federally funded agencies abroad from providing abortions has had an unintended effect: It actually contributed to a substantial increase in the number of abortions among women in sub-Saharan Africa. . . . The study (.pdf) was published online in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

LifeSiteNews.com: Researchers at the University of Washington published their findings October 4 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases about the contraceptive hormone shot, which is given every three months.

William English at Public Discourse: In a new bestseller, David Brooks contends that the “new sciences” point to the incredible reality and importance of old-fashioned things like education, character formation, and virtue.

Glenn T. Stanton at Baptist Press: Their data indicates that people with cohabiting experience who marry have a 50 to 80 percent higher likelihood of divorcing than married couples who never cohabited. A Canadian sociologist explains . . .

National Review Online: A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet has revealed that a common contraceptive doubles the risk of HIV infection — at least based on evidence from where it is most popularly recommended and used, in eastern and southern Africa (the world’s most AIDS-infected areas). The New York Times reports . . .

CNN.com Blogs: The authors are both psychologists who work at religious universities. Stanton Jones is a psychology professor and provost at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and Mark Yarhouse is a professor of mental health at Regent University, in Virginia Beach, which was founded by televangelist Pat Robertson.

LifeSiteNews: “Self-control is one of the strongest predictors of differences between people in terms of their involvement in crime,” said Dr. Walter Forrest, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Australia’s Monash University, in a press release from Monash University.

The Barna Group – Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church: No single reason dominated the break-up between church and young adults. Instead, a variety of reasons emerged. Overall, the research uncovered six significant themes why nearly three out of every five young Christians (59%) disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from church life after age 15. Reason #1 . . .

Christian Newswire: Many professional voices proclaim that it is impossible to change homosexual orientation, and that the attempt to change is commonly and inherently harmful. Psychologists Stanton L. Jones (Wheaton College, IL) and Mark A. Yarhouse (Regent University) have just published in the respected, peer-reviewed Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy the final results of their longitudinal study of individuals seeking sexual orientation change through involvement in a variety of Christian ministries affiliated with Exodus International. The results show change to be possible for some, and the attempt not harmful on average.

NYTimes.com: The cost of health insurance for many Americans this year climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs. A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation . . .

LifeSiteNews.com: Babies born from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) are up to 10 times more likely to suffer from rare genetic disorders, according to a pro-IVF geneticist. In an address to the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, University of Toronto geneticist Dr. Rosanna Weksberg called for more study of a link between fertility treatment and certain rare genetic disorders.

Christian Newswire: Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has released a groundbreaking new report setting forth thirteen new, documented cases of coercion: forced abortion (including one woman at eight months and another carrying twins at 8 ½ months), forced sterilization, forced contraception, the use of quotas, Family Planning Police, Family Planning jail cells, the demolition of homes, and the use of “implication” (detention, torture and fining of relatives of “violators”). Several of these cases are documented with extensive photographs as well. | Report

OneNewsNow.com: The Economic Policy Institute has recently discovered that the trade deficit with China has cost America 2.8 million jobs, most of which were in the manufacturing sector. Scott Paul is executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), which commissioned the study.

Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog: We often hear from doctor-prescribed death advocates that assisted suicide legalization improves palliative care. It’s not true.

Religion Clause: Yesterday the Institute on Religion and Public Policy released a lengthy analysis of Kazakhstan’s proposed new Law on Religious Activity and Religious Associations. The report concludes that . . .

NPR (includes audio): A new study finds 3,000 cases of young immigrant women being forced into marriage — across 47 U.S. states — and it suggests the issue is dramatically underreported. Those who refuse can face threats of violence, ostracism from their families, and financial repercussions that can lead to homelessness. Yet, advocates say there is very little legal recourse in this country.

NCPA Policy Digest: In the U.S. public school system today, the method used to determine teacher effectiveness — and thus to drive salary, promotion and tenure decisions — is based on a few external credentials: certification, advanced degrees and years of experience in the classroom. Little to no relationship exists between these credentials and the gains that a teacher’s students make on standardized math and reading exams.

Jennifer Corbett Doren at WSJ.com: The study, led by Northwestern University researchers, followed a large group of men in their 20s and found testosterone levels fell after they found partners and became fathers. Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone thought to contribute to behaviors and other traits that help men find mates. But lower testosterone levels could help men who are fathers better handle the demands of parenting and allow them to become more nurturing, the researchers suggested . . .

CNSnews.com: Muslim-majority countries score worst across a range of measures in a comprehensive new study tracking government restrictions on religion as well as social hostilities involving religion around the world.

Chuck Colson at LifeSiteNews.com: The study finds that cohabitation has increased fourteen-fold since 1970. This means that about 24 percent of children are born to cohabiting couples today. Meanwhile, another 20 percent are part of a cohabiting household at some point during their growing-up years. That means nearly half of all American children have lived in a home where the adults are merely living together rather than married.

Science Daily: Fathers who actively engage in raising their children can help make their offspring smarter and better behaved, according to new research from Concordia University . . .
Published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science | Fathers’ influence on children’s cognitive and behavioural functioning: A longitudinal study of Canadian families.
Pougnet, Erin; Serbin, Lisa A.; Stack, Dale M.; Schwartzman, Alex E.
Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, Vol 43(3), Jul 2011, 173-182. doi: 10.1037/a0023948

The Washington Post: A new report says cohabitation has replaced divorce as the biggest source of instability for American families. Brad Wilcox, the report’s author, chatted about why this is.

Physorg.com: said David Schramm, assistant professor in Human Development and Family Studies in the College of Human Environmental Sciences. “The study confirms that low income does have a negative impact on marital quality, but there are additional factors as well. The relationship between income and marital satisfaction is influenced by other issues, including whether or not the couple receives some form of government assistance.” . . . | David G. Schramm and V. William Harris, “Marital Quality and Income: An Examination of the Influence of Government Assistance,” 32 Journal of Family and Economic Issues 437-448 (Sept. 2011)

SMH.com.au: Spiralling rates of child abuse and neglect, of children being placed in foster care and of teenage mental health problems – including a dramatic rise in hospitalisation for self-harm – are rooted in the rise of one-parent families and de facto couples, violent or unstable relationships and divorce, the report says. Its author, Patrick Parkinson, a Sydney University law professor . . . | More information at Australian Christian Lobby | The Report is titled For Kids’ Sake

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers.