The headline "Nearly half of abortion patients are minors" is misleading

On May 19, Chen Yijun, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published an investigation report in Guangzhou, saying that currently underage girls in China are

The trend of younger patients undergoing abortion is getting worse, with underage patients accounting for 40% to 50% of all surgical patients. (See Guangzhou Daily, May 20)

When reporting this news, the newspaper's main headline was "Nearly half of abortion patients are minors." When I followed the headline and couldn't wait to read the shocking survey results, I felt misled.

The facts of the news are as follows: Chen Yijun and his team have been working with a large maternity and child hospital in Beijing since 1997 and have found that among the women who have undergone abortions in the hospital, the proportion of minors has reached 40-50%. Based on this fact, the saying "nearly half of those who undergo abortions are minors" came into being.

The main title of the statistical results of just one maternity and child hospital in Beijing is "Nearly half of those who undergo abortion are minors", which can easily lead people to form the following concept: this is a nationwide professional survey and the statistical results of minors across the country.

As expected, after checking the reprinted titles of major portals, I was surprised to find that the editors of the websites had been generally misled. Some of them even added terms that limited the geographical scope after being misled, turning them into "Survey shows that nearly half of Chinese abortion patients are minors" and "Nearly half of mainland abortion patients are minors". Among the many comments, many people truly believed that China's minors were generally depraved, and even lamented that the world was going downhill.

As the old saying goes, "read the headlines when reading the newspaper". News headlines have always been regarded as the "eye of the news". They should convey condensed factual information to the audience, the most basic element of which is "who" is "doing what (or 'how')". This "who" must be specific and cannot be generalized or generalized. The main headline "Nearly half of those who undergo abortion are minors" obviously does not meet this requirement.

Some people may say that this survey is a sampling survey, which can reveal the whole picture from a single part, but the typicality of this "sample" is still questionable. First, "maternity and child hospitals" may be the first choice for underage girls to seek medical treatment, and the proportion of underage patients seeking medical treatment may be higher than that of other hospitals; second, this is a hospital in Beijing, and most of those who have the conditions and opportunities to come here are urban residents, and there are relatively few people who come from rural areas for surgery. Precocious puberty of minors is more common in big cities, and the impact of nutritious food, the Internet, and film and television dramas on ripening are relatively small in rural areas. Therefore, this sample cannot be used as a representative of all hospitals, and it is far from representing China.

In the Internet age, reading titles has become a trend, and the requirements for media titles will become more stringent. The basic requirement is to seek truth from facts, and any exaggeration or concealment is unacceptable.