YES On 73 NEWS RELEASE
Date: October 31, 2005
Contact: Stan Devereux
(916) 446-6460
American Academy of Pediatrics Caught in Scientific Deception
PAST PRESIDENT SAYS STUDY IS DISTORTED TO DEFEAT PROPOSITION 73
SACRAMENTO- The current president of the American College of Pediatricians and a past president of
the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), along with two other California physicians, has called on
AAP to immediately withdraw “for correction and further study” its statement opposing parental
involvement laws, including Proposition 73 in California. The physicians, all Fellows of AAP, cite
“indisputable inaccuracy and bias” in an AAP study that is being used to distort the truth in effort to
defeat Prop 73.
Joseph Zanga, M.D., FAAP, along with Jane Anderson, M.D., FAAP, a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics
at the University of California, San Francisco, and Paul Macdonald, M.D., FAAP, a pediatrician in
private practice in Ukiah, sent a letter Monday to the current AAP president challenging the numerous
significant errors in the AAP statement, errors that have been repeated by Proposition 73 opponents and
widely disseminated by the mass media.
Dr. Zanga, professor of pediatrics at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in
Greenville, North Carolina, was President of the AAP from 1997 to 1998 and currently serves on its
Bioethics Committee.
Several misrepresentations in the AAP statement involve a 1992 study of minors seeking abortion by
Stanley Henshaw and Kathryn Kost. In 2003, Dr. Henshaw testified that the AAP statement concerning
the percentage of minors who inform a parent of their planned abortion in the absence of parental
involvement laws was “entirely incorrect.”
Other areas in which the AAP statement was false included the most frequent reasons minors cited for
not telling parents and the percentage of minors who involve an adult other than a parent in their
decision.
According to Dr. Macdonald, “Though I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, the distortion and
misquotation of data are so obvious that I am forced to conclude that the AAP authors are attempting to
promote a specific political agenda.” He added, “I was angered and saddened that, in the nine years
since the original publication of this statement, no update has been approved correcting these egregious
errors. Any high school student comparing the AAP statement with the Henshaw study could spot these
errors.”
“The AAP authors cited the Henshaw study for four points, and in each case they misrepresented the
results of the study. Unfortunately, this misinformation has been repeated countless times by opponents
of Proposition 73 and extensively reported in the media. We hope that AAP, Planned Parenthood, and
the media will do the right thing and acknowledge these errors,” Dr. Anderson said.
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