It also crossed my mind that it would
be awfully hard to gather any meaningful statistics on a practice that by
definition, is underground, by virtue of it's illegality.
A problem that surfaces often. For example, you tend to see statistics saying things like "only one third of all rapes are reported." Huh? If the other two-thirds aren't reported, how do we know they happened? Because politically, certain groups need them to have happened.
A related problem is definition. That one comes up in sexual harrassment. Again, you get statistics saying, for example, that 80% of all college women have been sexually harrassed. Well, if you define a leer as sexual harrassment, probably true. As I used to say in my debating days, let me define the terms and I will win any argument.
That, or course, is the key to the abortion issue. Defining terms. Define the fetus as mere tissue, and the pro-abortion argument "wins." Define the fetus as a person, and the pro-life argument "wins."
73% of all arguments actually turn on differences of definition; only 27% have underlying substance. (How do I know those statistics are accurate? Simple. I made them up. Just like 61% of all statistics are made up.) |
