Citation

Kelly T. JAMA Psychiatry 2023; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, American Medical Association)

DOI

10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.1406

PMID

37256590

Abstract

To the Editor I write to express concerns about the article by Zandberg et al1 on the association between restrictive abortion laws and suicide rates. These concerns include the descriptions of publicly available data, omission of data that may bias the measure of the dependent variable, and inappropriate and insufficient use of control variables.

The authors claim that substantial data are not available for analysis. The authors write that "some data were not available, which could have led to an ascertainment bias. Nevertheless, data from which our findings were derived included 1115 observations from across 50 states."1 Likewise, a reader could notice the scope of missing data by examining the tables in the article. Table 1 reports 1022 observations for the years 1976 to 2016. With 41 years and 50 states, one would expect 2050 observations. The authors are missing more than half that...

Language: en