Last week’s Chronicle story about a new study showing Texas’ parental notification laws could cost $44 million is perfect fodder for a Chronicle editorial today:
In a study designed to measure the impact of two Texas laws limiting the confidentiality of teen access to health care, Luisa Franzini, an assistant professor of management, policy and community health at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, noted that 37 percent of girls who use reproductive health care services will stop doing so out of concern their parents would be informed.
Based on that number, Franzini and her team calculated Texas should expect 8,265 additional teen pregnancies, 5,372 teen births and 1,654 abortions. The economic impact could amount to $43.6 million per year in additional public health care costs. That figure does not take into account thousands of additional cases of sexually transmitted diseases in adolescents.
The whole study is based on hypotheticals, potentials and estimates, words frequently used in the report. The “37 percent” number used by Franzini is an estimate, as noted in the original Chronicle story, and that estimate is loosely based on some numbers taken from a previous Planned Parenthood affiliated study. Since Planned Parenthood has a big financial interest in getting its hands on taxpayer dollars, and that’s a big part of what’s really at stake here, we need to view the base number, and this entire study, with some skepticism.
The editors also fail to point out that two of the authors are associated with Planned Parenthood of Houston and that one of those Planned Parenthood authors is now Mayor White’s health policy advisor.
What is frustrating is the stock the editors place in this hypothetical- and estimate-laced study. What if the Heritage Foundation produced a study showing that teens who made virginity pledges had lower levels of teen sex, which in turn means lower rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Of course the Chronicle editors would look upon such a study with disdain.
On the Chronicle‘s website, Cohen provides his own rationale behind the editorial pages:
As the 10th editor of The Houston Chronicle, I have asked our editorial writers to be unsparing critics and to not back down from creating discomfort for even the most powerful elements in this city. We should be skeptical. We should be aggressive. But, at the same time, we should be fair.
Skepticism was running low when this editorial was written.
