Katha Pollitt comments on the abortion poll posted here. I only read through about half of this before I got completely turned off by her blatant misuse of numbers. Polls, it seems, are only useful when they favour leftist thinking. Here, Pollitt somehow manages to nix the numbers while simultaneously supporting them. Here, she attacks the poll?s reliability:

You could argue that the very act of conducting a lengthy poll by telephone skews the response pool. What sort of person bares her soul to pollsters for upward of an hour–and during the holiday season yet? The sort of person, apparently, who has never heard of Roe v. Wade, which only 43 percent could identify.

And then a little further into the column she writes:

Respondents were slightly poorer than the national average, and more likely to be married (56 percent versus 52 percent); wives tend to be more conservative than single women. Most controversial, 45 percent identified themselves as “born-again or Evangelical Christian,” in line with the Gallup poll but substantially higher than some others (a July 2001 ABC poll came up with 37 percent). Perhaps an overrepresentation of marrieds and born-agains helps explain the abortion responses, which are on the anti-choice end of the current spectrum of polls.

Apparently Pollitt doesn?t consider poor, married, and Christian women to have as much weight as wealthy, single, religiously unaffiliated women in the feminist movement. This is one of the most damning reasons why feminism has been proclaimed as a dying movement. The hypocrisy of the movement are its claims of universality, yet offer only exclusivity and partisanship. Sounds like a political ideology that starts with ?L?.
The rest of her column is fairly typical liberal claptrap, occasionally glossing over important facts of the poll in order to strengthen her case. She finally ends with a call for feminists and activists and other ‘ists’ to take action, since the poll reveals that “[they've] let the grassroots education and activism slide.”
Hmmm, but I thought the poll was completely unreliable?