One researcher noted that many women in the study refused to participate in the follow-up questions about regret. Michael New writes,
“From 2008 to 2010, Turnaway Project researchers sought participants at more than 30 abortion facilities located in 21 U.S. states and found 667 women who obtained abortions to participate. However, less than 38 percent of the women they asked actually agreed to take part in the study. It seems likely that the women who made themselves available for the study might have had either a higher level of decisional certainty or fewer moral qualms about obtaining an abortion, skewing the results.
Such a flaw is called survivorship bias, where participants in a study are inherently the ones who made it through the whole study. For example, a study on the effectiveness of depression medicine would be flawed if 50% of participants dropped out because the medicine made them worse.
Fox News quotes Kristan Hawkins, saying, “This ‘study’ has all the validity of a Tobacco Institute finding that smoking is good for you. Mainstream media did not highlight the fact that this report is the product of the pro-abortion Bixby Center… which always concludes that abortion is good for you,’ Hawkins said.”