Here is the news story with commentary here.
I followed the link to find that, as of 1999:
1) 70% of all US children were 11 years old or younger.
2) this group (<=11 yo) accounted for ~ 50 stereotypical kidnappings and ~ 10,000 "non-family abductions."
3) there were 2.5 times as many children older than 11 years old who were so abducted in 1999.
4) given the child population of ~70M in that year, and unrealistically assuming uniformly distributed risk (it's not), means that children under 11 would have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being abducted in the broadest sense of this study's definition and a 1 in 1 million chance in the stereotypical sense.
By comparison to the larger of these abduction numbers for <=11 year-olds, in 2010 roughly the same number of children died due to medical complications and about half this number died simply due to being in a car. These numbers include children up to 19 years old, so it's not a completely fair comparison. But I still think it makes the point: if you're against healthcare reform and are willing to put your child in a car, there's no rational basis for calling the cops on this woman.
In various online conversations I continue to post these and related mortality data because discussions about children rouse people's emotions, including my own, and data is helpful to ground/anchor one's sense of real risks.
