98% of Catholic Women Use Birth Control? Irrelevant and Unlikely.

We’ve all heard about the Obama administration’s infringement on the Catholic Church’s right to not pay for birth control, which it believes is against the will of God. And now you’re probably hearing the backlash from the left, where they’re touting a Guttmacher Institute report which says:

Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women.

The liberals’ claim is that because it is so commonplace, asking the Catholic Church to fund birth control is no great hardship.

Of course that makes no sense. The fact is that the Church believes it to be immoral. Period. It has nothing to do with how many people are committing sin in the Church’s eyes. Using this sort of “majority rules morality,” we could quickly erode every tenet of every religion. Adultery commonplace? Subsidize it!!

But what of the “98%” statistic itself? Is this true?

Well, the Guttmacher report starts off with this very open-minded statement:

The debate over contraception has long been settled in real-life America.

“Real-life America?” That’s precious.

So you can see that the authors of the report are not particularly friendly toward the religious view. You might even call them heavily biased and patronizing. But back to that 98% stat – what to make of that?

The 98% statistic starts with all women, narrows it down to Catholic women, narrows it further to Catholic women who have ever had sex (guess women who are practicing abstinence don’t matter), and then narrows it still further to Catholic women who have had sex who are not trying to get pregnant/currently pregnant/postpartum. And the question asks if they have “ever used” a contraceptive.

So if you used a contraceptive once in your life but later repented, you are assumed to fully support the Obama administration’s position. If you use contraceptives despite thinking it is wrong, you are assumed to fully support the Obama administration’s position. If you followed the Church’s position on birth control, but are now trying to get pregnant, you don’t matter, as is the case if you have abstained from sex.

But I digress – let’s get back to that statistic. Where did it really come from?

Turns out that the Guttmacher Institute did some data mining in the National Survey for Family Growth’s data set:

This report was based on data from the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Designed and administered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the NSFG produces national estimates of factors affecting pregnancy, including sexual activity and contraceptive use. Data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women aged 15–44 between June 2006 and December 2008.

Fair enough. But when you go to the NSFG’s discussion of their data, you find this statement concerning responses on religion:

In the 2006-2010 file, there are too few cases to do analysis with the detailed religion categories. This may change as more cases are collected.

Now, the survey has been going for 4 years. When Guttmacher did their analysis, there were 7356 women surveyed. By 2010 there over 12,000, but the NSFG says 12,000 reponses is too few to do the sort of data mining that Guttmacher is doing. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

So where does that leave us? Very simply,

• The 98% number should never have been derived in the first place, because the data set was not large enough to justify it.
• Even if it were true, the 98% value misrepresents the attitudes of Catholic women.
• Even if if didn’t misrepresent those attitudes, it would be irrelevant. The moral code of the Catholic Church is not derived from a vote among its members, or acquiescence to “real-life.” It is, by the Church’s teachings, derived from God (who, BTW, was also left out of the NSFG’s survey).