Blood tests used to determine pregnancy can at times be inconclusive. This means that the test has been unable to determine if the woman is pregnant or not pregnant. Regardless, some doctors refuse to perform further surgeries because of an inconclusive pregnancy test result.

If the statements above are true, which of the following conclusions is most strongly supported by them?

A) Pregnancy tests should always be given prior to surgery

B) Most women with inconclusive pregnancy tests are actually pregnant

C) Some surgical procedures are affected by whether or not a woman is pregnant

D) Some doctors require a pregnancy test be given when evaluating female candidates for any surgery

E) A pregnancy test that returns a negative result is sometimes incorrect

This question is from Critical Reasoning Bible.

It is a Must Be True Question, which means that we have to select an AC that is best supported by the stimulus.

I can understand why A, B and E are not the correct. I am struggling to choose between C and D.

If I had to choose between C and D, I would choose C because D uses a somewhat stronger language "any surgery". But I can't exclude one of the two AC with certainty (to my understanding they are both wrong since from the passage we cant be sure that either will be always true)

Any comments?

i go for C, if correct will explain

C is talking about surgical procedure only not the surgery itself. I am going with D.

There's no information at all about whether doctors *require* pregnancy tests - for all we know, patients take those tests voluntarily - so D cannot be right.

B is also not right - there is no reason to think that women with inconclusive tests are pregnant *most* of the time. If a surgical procedure was dangerous during pregnancy, then doctors would probably not perform surgeries even if an inconclusive test meant actual pregnancy only some of the time.

Now, we know from the passage that some doctors will not perform surgeries if a woman has an inconclusive pregnancy test. That is, if there is some chance a woman is pregnant, the doctor will not perform surgery. If that's the case, then it matters whether the woman is pregnant - why else would the doctor care about an inconclusive pregnancy test? So the answer is C.
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I am a bit confused :S

We must choose an answer choice that will be correct all the time. Not an answer that could be true, an answer that must always be True (based on the passage).

What we know is that some doctors refuse to perform surgeries when woman have taken a pregnancy test which has turned out inconclusive. Which means that the doctors don't want to perform surgeries when they don't know if a woman is pregnant or not.

Why should we assume AC C is the reason (that some surgical procedures are affected by whether a woman is pregnant or not)?

Isn't it possible that they do it for another reason? For moral reasons for example? Or they might be doing it to charge the woman more money or for any other reason. To my understanding AC C could be correct, but we can't say with certainty that this is the reason 100%.

and about AC B: It states that the doctors require a pregnancy test to be given. Why is this wrong? Just because of the "strong word" *require*? Because to my understand they do ask for a pregnancy test.

Am I assuming something wrong?

+1 D
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C and D look like the best choices so I'd go with D. Maybe the doc chooses not to operate on women with sketchy preg tests because he hates women?

I have a problem with the wording of the stimulus: "Regardless" of the unreliability of preg tests, some doctors still take into account the unreliability?

What?

I'd understand a "thus" or "as such" but I don't get the purpose of "regardless" here.
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I would go for C
A: Baseless
B: Baseless
C: Correct: A good reason why some doctors would refuse to perform surgeries after an inconclusive result would be if pregnancy affected the surgical procedure in question.
D: I can't see why people are going for this. Nowhere does the question state that any doctors require their patients to take pregnancy test. The only thing stated is that some of them may refuse to perform further surgery if a test is inconclusive. So again Baseless IMO
E: Baseless