Introduction
On Friday, 6 May 2022, I gave a speech at the Morning Knights Toastmasters club, regarding the Disinformation Age. I referenced an article in the NATO Review, titled Countering disinformation: improving the Alliance’s digital resilience, published 12 August 2021.
The article referenced a study by John Hopkins, Imperial College London, & Georgia Tech that provided some information that we as individuals can do to limit our contribution to the spread of misinformation as well as recommending some tools that social media sites may use to help slow the spread of disinformation.
Today, I received an email from Flipboard that commented on the Supreme Court's recent leaked decision to overturn Roe verse Wade. The article that caught my eye and I followed up on was Ben Franklin’s Abortion Recipe, published by Slate.com. I read the article and thought it interesting, so I wanted to follow up on it to see if Ben Franklin really did publish a recipe for abortion.
I did several searches to see if I could find an online version of Franklin's book, The American Instructor. I did find a version at Evans TCP. It looks like it is an uncorrected optical recognition (OCR) scan of the book, but it is readable. The recipe which Slate.com referred to is Suppression of the Courses. Reading the recipe, gave an idea as to what Suppression of the Courses refers to and it begged the question, 'Is this really a recipe for abortion or a recipe to encourage regular menstrual cycle?' A bit more investigation was required.
Additional searches seemed to indicate that Suppression of the Courses is indeed the suppression of the menstrual cycle, a.k.a. missing a period, which may be caused by several things including pregnancy. This still does not give a great deal of confidence that one can state that this is a recipe for abortion although it is possible. It would take a few historians looking it over to provide a definitive answer but is quite possible. It sounds more like a story meant to draw readers to Slate.com.
I wanted to know how reliable and bias Slate.com is so my next search was to find out. I found an excellent site, ad fontes media that helps answer both questions. I found the page on their site for Slate, which provides their analysis. At the time of this post, they gave Slate scores of 37.04 for reliability and -15.27 for bias. These numbers really do not mean much unless you know what the scale is and how these scores match other publications. Fortunately, they provide a quad chart that provides this information. Using the quad chart, one can see that Slate is "reliable for news, but high in analysis/opinion content with a skew to the left.
Conclusion
The email from Flipboard led me down a rabbit hole, that I was not intending to go down, but I wanted to show how slowing down and thinking about something before sharing may be a good thing. I'm still not certain if the recipe that Ben Franklin published was truly for abortion or not. I will leave that up to the historians to discuss. It very well may be, and if it is, then we all could use a history lesson. If it is not, then it is another example how media companies take something and turn it around to cause users to come to their site and spread the story to drive more traffic.
I know I will not be sharing the link to the article with others and claim it is the truth. I'm not certain if the article is correct, but I can be certain it came from a biased point of view. I would have liked to see the article have some historians discuss the recipe and state if it indeed included abortion or if it was simply a recipe to help women have a regular menstrual cycle. If nothing else, it shows that these things were discussed in the open in Franklin's time. It does make one wonder if our ideas of the past really reflect reality. One would not have thought that information on women's menstruation would have been published in a general textbook of the times.
Remember stop, think, and if not certain, validate. This was a much deeper analysis than you need to do most of the time but it shows how media use our emotions to help drive traffic to their sites.
