VENDING SPENDING
Vending machines in the US sell $10 billion of candies and snacks a year. These authors chose highly-used machines at one university, grouped healthier products (marked “Eat Well”) into one eye-level section that accounted for one-third of these machines’ displays, and raised the price of popular candy bars 25%. They compared individual sales and overall financial performance with other unmodified machines on campus. During the two-month intervention period, 21.3% of products purchased from the intervention machines were healthier choices, compared to 1.3% of purchases from comparison machines. Revenue was not compromised compared to the previous year among the intervention machines. Health-promoting interventions can influence consumers who are undecided about what snack to choose when they approach a vending machine.
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PSEUDOSCIENCE AND ABORTION POLICY
In 2012, when US Representative Todd Akin from Missouri was asked if abortion was justified in cases of rape, he notoriously said that pregnancy as a result of rape is rare because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.” Arguments made against abortion, like this one, are often riddled with pseudoscience.
As the map above shows, 29 states, home to 88 million women, have implemented at least two abortion restrictions not backed by scientific evidence.
For example, Texas’s “Woman’s Right to Know” booklet, offered to patients before having an abortion, uses deceptive language to lead readers to believe that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave this claim in the booklet three “Pinocchios” on their rating scale, meaning that there was a “significant factual error” present. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement in 2009 concluding that there is “no association between induced abortion and breast cancer.”
Kentucky’s Senate Bill 5, passed in 2017, made it illegal to have an abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy. The sponsor of the bill cited fetal pain as justification for the law, calling abortion after 20 weeks an “awful painful experience” for the fetus. However, a review of fetal pain evidence found that fetuses are unlikely to feel pain before the third trimester (around 29 weeks).
Kansas, Texas, and South Dakota have the highest number of these types of pseudoscientific restrictions with seven each.
Map: Guttmacher Institute, States Hostile to Abortion Rights, Policy Trends in the States, 2017
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