Peoria's Pea-brain Protocol

I was recently asked about the role of emergency contraception in cases of rape. Can a Catholic accept such a thing? The answer is a resounding "NO!", although the USCCB is rather confused on the issue.

As CatholicCulture.com website says:

Here's what the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Institutions (ERDs) from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say about it:

"A female who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault. If, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization. It is not permissible, however, to initiate or to recommend treatments that have as their purpose or direct effect the removal, destruction, or interference with the implantation of a fertilized ovum."

A hospital in the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, developed a protocol for Catholic hospitals that face this situation. Called (appropriately enough) the Peoria Protocol, it was put together by the staff at OSF St. Francis Medical Center and theologians in the diocese working under then-Bishop John J. Myers. 

According to this theory, then, since the woman hasn't ovulated yet, the man's sperm can be considered an attacker, like bacteria. Since you can take prophylactic antibiotics, you can take anti-spermicide or anti-ovulatory agents. According to this theory, it isn't considered contraception since the sperm is in "attack" mode - I guess they have little green berets on or something.

The whole argument is absurd, and the monsignor who was instrumental in developing it (I knew him and worked with him on the chancery staff a few years after the protocol was developed), apparently neglected to consider the theology involved.

The only way a human life comes into existence is through God creating and infusing a human soul. If He doesn't do that, it doesn't matter how many sperm make it to the egg - no fertilization, no new life, will exist. Human life is the combination of soul and body. No soul, no human life, no embryonic growth, no way to implant, yada, yada, yada.

Now consider what would happen if no spermicide or anti-ovulatory agent is used and God never got around to creating and infusing the human soul. What would be the result? There would be no result. The sperm would do no harm to the woman. None. They would just curl up, die and disappear. They might make it to the egg, but without a human soul, what difference would that make? None. The sperm couldn't fertilize the egg in such a way that a new human life would appear. 

So, you can certainly say the rapist or whoever is attacking the woman. You can certainly try to prevent that attack. But you can NEVER say the sperm is attacking anything, because the sperm is not capable of causing any damage. The worst it does, in conjunction with God, is cause a human life to begin.

And if we're going to call the creation of a new human soul and a new human life an attack, then God is a serial rapist.

So, the Peoria protocol is complete crap, as I said. Human life is always a gift, unless you get in front of this particular monsignor and the bishops foolish enough to follow him, in which case human life is sometimes the combination of an embryo and God gang-raping a woman. 

But this is what passes for high-falutin' theological scholarship nowadays, don'tcha'know.

The GOP Cassandra

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

What does Akin mean by "a legitimate rape"? Well, according to this news story, FBI and US DOJ studies over the course of years have demonstrated that about one in four rape allegations are fabricated. False. Made up. Created out of whole cloth. 

And we already know that rapists impregnate women at a lower rate than is normally expected. That is, we already know that Mr. Akin is correct.

Fact: An unfertilized human egg lasts 24 hours in the reproductive tract.
Fact: A woman can't get pregnant unless she ovulates.
Fact: Stress delays ovulation.
Fact: Rape is stressful.
Conclusion: Therefore, rape is likely to cause delayed ovulation and result in no pregnancy than a normal act of consensual intercourse.

These facts are individually uncontested
It's only when you put the facts together and draw the conclusion that the liberals begin frothing at the mouth.

Why?

Well, they are heavily invested in abortion.
As the internet has grown, the information surrounding how the abortion industry actually works is slowly revealing itself. No one likes that. It is bad for business. 

All the abortion crowd has left to defend abortion is rape, incest and fetal deformity.
If the truth were to get out - rape actually results in lower than expected pregnancy - one of their three remaining bullets would be lost. Worse, by using the phrase "legitimate rape", Akin actually  alluded to the fact that 25% of rape allegations are faked. One in four "raped" women are liars, actively trying to destroy some innocent man's life. Possibly, their "rape-pregnancy" is likewise a lie.

None of these facts can be borne. 

So, Akin has to be slimed even though the facts are virtually self-evident, even if the facts ALL favor Akin. 

Especially since the facts all favor Akin. 

And notice how the Republican hoi polloi have supported him.
Cough. 

Men in power, whether Democrat or Republican, want legal abortion.
So do women in power.

For as long as blood banks have been in business, we have known that nearly 30% of women have lied to their husbands about the paternity of "their" children.

Powerful men want to keep screwing women. Powerful women want to be screwed by powerful men. Neither group wants anyone else to know. Pregnancy and children are hard to keep secret. Well, they're hard to keep secret if the children are alive. If the pregnancy is aborted and the children are dead, there's no problem.

Have you ever noticed that one-in-three children are the result of cuckolding and one-in-three children are aborted? Funny how those statistics mesh so well.

As I said, Akin is completely correct, but no one can afford for that to get out.

Cassandra, call your office. 


UPDATE:
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.


UPDATE: II
Easily obtained DNA testing will certainly have an impact on the discussion.

UPDATE III:
For those who don't trust my analysis, read this.
Seems Karl Rove "joked" that Todd Akin should be murdered for having spoken the truth.
Powerful Republican men are identical to powerful Democrats - they both want one thing, and they want legal abortion so they can keep doing that one thing.

Of Pregnancy and Rape

Republican Todd Akins is in trouble for saying that a woman is less likely to get pregnant as a result of rape then she is at other times of her life.

Everyone is jumping on Akins because he said something wrong. Nobody has really demonstrated exactly what his error is. Either what he said is true or it is not. That is, either raped women get pregnant at lower rates than the general population of sexually active women or they do not.

If he is wrong, then he should apologize.
If he is not, there is no need.

I've heard lots of pro-lifers say the kind of thing Akin just said, but I've never seen the studies that backed it up. So, I thought I would take a look around.

Here's an abstract of a study by the NIMH that indicates "The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator."

(Remember that bit about adolescents, pregnancy and rape. It will be important later.)

So, according to the NIMH, rape has about a 5% chance of causing a pregnancy. OK. Well, how often would a woman typically get pregnant from one act of unprotected sex with someone she wanted to have sex with? According to this study, there is no difference - rape and consensual sex have the same pregnancy rates. But, according to a second study, if you add up all the numbers on the second study's graph in the most generous way over the 28  days of a typical menstrual cycle, you get a figure of about 3.5%.

So, it would appear that rape may actually increase the chance of pregnancy.
Hmmm... before we have poor Mr. Akin apologize, let's think about this a bit.

According to yet another study, the woman's choice to have sexual activity tends to cluster around her most fertile days. In fact, the study hypothesizes that intercourse can stimulate ovulation. Whether or not that hypothesis is true, we know the six days before ovulation are the woman's most fertile days. Having sex on a fertile day vastly increases the probability of pregnancy.

"Yes", I hear you say, "but we're talking about rape, you idiot, which - by definition - the woman doesn't choose."

Well, true. The woman doesn't choose to be raped.
But the man does choose whom to rape.
And we haven't taken that into account.

For instance, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network statistics on rape victims show:

• 29% are age 12-17.
• 44% are under age 18.
• 80% are under age 30.
• ages 12-34 are the highest risk years.
• Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

Now, we already know from the previous studies that a woman's fertility begins dropping starting at age 30, and drops like a rock at 35. So does rape. In fact, rapists disproportionately pick fertile females. And we already know that men can tell when a woman is fertile.

So, can rapists tell when a woman is fertile? Do rapists preferentially rape fertile women? Because, if they do, then the rate of pregnancy should be much higher among rape victims than among the general population. And if the pregnancy rate is not appreciably higher, then Mr. Akins is, in fact, correct. That is, if consensual intercourse can stimulate ovulation then it is not unreasonable to assume that rape might reduce ovulation. If rapists chose fertile targets but had a lower-than-expected pregnancy outcome, that might be evidence that rape can inhibit ovulation.

In passing, it should be noted that schools of evolutionary psychology generally support the hypothesis that rapists seek out fertile females.

Now, let's recall the NIMH study above. Most of the pregnancies were (a) in adolescents and (b) by a known perpetrator, that is, someone who might know the adolescent well enough to (un)knowingly recognize the tell-tale signsof fertility.

And, with all that in mind, it looks like the experts being brought in to lambaste Akins are actually inadvertently providing support for what he said. 

Consider Politico's piece. The experts Politico quotes indicate that rape creates about twice the pregnancies of normal intercourse. The experts do admit that this is because rapists target fertile young women. But if rapists were actually targeting fertile young women during their fertile periods - as we know is possible - then the rate of pregnancy should be around 15%, not around 5% or 6%.

Hmmmm....

To my knowledge, no one has done a study to determine if rapists target fertile women during their most fertile periods, so I can't tell if Akins is wrong, but no one else seems able to prove he's wrong either. And we don't know if women on hormonal contraception (which might well mask pheromone signals) are raped at a different rate than women not taking hormonal contraception. 

So why the brouhaha? 

Obviously, the MSM and the Democrats want to keep pro-life senate hopefuls out of office. So, they start a tempest about Akins because it will score political points. Akins can't clearly back up what he says, and the pro-aborts know it, so all they have to do is keep the focus off the fact that he might actually be right. This is easy enough to do.

The Republicans will go along with it because Mitt doesn't want something this stupid to derail his bid for the Presidency. As Ronald Reagan said, "if you're explaining, you're not winning." Finding out whether Akins is right is not worth the time.

Akins is being thrown under the bus because it's an election year. I suspect that he will end up like Dan Quayle - vindicated far too late for it to do any good. 

UPDATE
Looks like I'm not alone in this estimation.
This article is a nice discussion of the pregnancy problem from a hormonal point of view.
The author points out that high stress is a known cause of infertility - referenced constantly by fertility experts.

So, if the liberals are to be believed, rape is NOT a stressful event in a woman's life.
At least, that would be a fair summary of their argument, given the science.

Overall, it looks like the entire brouhaha has been ginned up by lying liberals in order to make Todd Akin look bad... and the Republican party is willing to go along with it because it would be too difficult to correct the record.

Update II
Some readers are questioning if rapists really target fertile women.
It seems they do,
Oh, and 7% of women are subject to pre-eclampsia... forgot about that.
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.

UPDATE III
Further evidence that rapists may know when women ovulate, and may therefore seek them out preferentially...
  

I Confess

When Christians see the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, "I Confess", they generally have one of two reactions: either they nod in agreement or they leave the film in absolute horror. Depending on how one understands one's own Christianity, the action the priest takes in the last five minutes of the movie is either (a) beautifully  perfect or (b) disorienting and perverse.

For Christians, there is no middle ground.

I won't spoil the ending by describing it, but as an RCIA director, I enjoy recommending that movie to new Catholics precisely because their reaction to the movie's ending will give them, and me, a feel for how Catholic their worldview is.

Similarly, "The Scarlet and the Black" is an historically accurate movie whose ending discombobulates
Christian audiences. The last five minutes are, again, shocking. Some Christians walk out disgusted, muttering under their breath about the perversity of the Catholic Church in general and Catholic priests in particular. But others walk out strengthened in their Christian convictions by the movie's resolution.

And so we come to Cardinal Dolan's Al Smith Dinner and the invitation of Barack Obama. Indeed, we might treat on the way the Al Smith Dinner organizers treat pro-abort groups versus pro-life groups in general.

Is Dolan acting as a stooge or a Christian?

Is it scandal to give Obama a platform, or is this Dolan's brilliant scheme to give Barack the opportunity to either publicly make up or make a fool of himself?

Mary Ann Kreitzer opines that Dolan's invitation shows disrespect for the unborn. Dolan would presumably never entertain the idea of inviting Barack to dinner if our fine President were in the habit of "stabbing a bishop in the head and sucking out his brains." And she brings forward numerous Scriptural examples of precisely this refusal. I confess an enormous amount of sympathy for Mrs. Kreitzer's position.

But, as I listened to this morning's sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, I realized there was historical precedent of a sort. We have the example of the Church in and after World War II.

Even though the Nazis were responsible for slaughtering thousands of religious, priests and bishops in death camps across Eastern Europe, the Pope approved of smuggling these same Nazis - including Adolf Eichmann - out from under the nose of Allied troops who wanted Nazi leaders arrested, tried and hanged.

Now, the comparison is not exact. The Vatican ratlines were run in secret, those smuggled out were not being given a public forum. Still, there is no indication that the men being smuggled out were penitent - as in Eichmann's case, we can be pretty sure that at least some of them were not.

So, what are we to think about Cardinal Dolan inviting our modern-day Eichmann to a public dinner, in which the participants 'roast' one another? Does it signal some tacit approval of Barack Obama?

Well, again, we have precedent. For instance, we know Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, signed a concordat with Hitler on behalf of the Church, even though Pacelli was under no illusions about the integrity of the man with whom he treated:

“This man is completely obsessed,” he said. “All that is not of use to him, he destroys; all that he says and writes carries the mark of his egocentricity; this man is capable of trampling on corpses and eliminating all that obstructs him." [editor's note: does this sound familiar?]

Pacelli said "I had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich"...Pinchas Lapide notes that whilst negotiations for Concordat were taking place, pressure had been put on the Vatican by the arrest of ninety-two priests, the searching of Catholic youth club premises, and the closing down of nine Catholic publications. 

Concluding a concordat with a madman is certainly a lot more binding then simply inviting him to dinner. Even so, the Church has chosen to treat with madmen many, many times in her history. We have not yet had to descend to the level of concluding a treaty with Barack Hussein Obama, although the pressure he places on Catholic institutions in this country have not gone unnoticed by Rome.

November has not yet come. Neither Cardinal Dolan nor we know for certain who will win the election, or what this particular madman will do if he does win a second term. Many, including myself, hold honest concerns that an Obama victory would spell the end of the remnants of free elections in the United States.

So, is Cardinal Dolan's invitation scandalous or wise?
Is it an exercise in Christian charity or participation in evil?

I honestly don't know.
I pray that Cardinal Dolan does.

The Death of Chivalry

Some woman was lamenting the death of chivalry.
She thought women had a right to chivalry, a right to be treated well.
She lamented the fact that she couldn't find a chivalrous man anymore.

And so many articles say the same thing today, articles pushed by righteous Catholics who think that if men would just MAN UP and treat women right, all the problems will go away.

So men get blamed for playing video games, watching porn, refusing responsibility, walking away from the women they have sex with, using women, objectifying them, yada, yada, yada.

Yes, men do all those mean nasty things - no question of it.
But why do you think they do it?

Maybe they have their reasons too, eh?
Maybe after being told for 40 or 50 years that their opinions don't matter, some of those men decide to take society at its word. We are always so careful never to insult the pregnant mother who is walking towards the abortion clinic, "she's a victim, too!"

Yes, I'm sure she is.
But before us friendly neighborhood Catholics start passing around articles about the skunks that men are, how about we consider what might turn a man into a skunk? If a woman may not realize that she is really carrying a child, and not just a bag of cells, might it not be the case that a man may not realize that he actually might have a purpose in life bigger than World of Warcraft? Society tells men the same lies it tells women, yet men are attacked, and women are cosseted, when both believe the same lies, take them to heart, and try to live them out.

So, this was my thoughts on the matter:

You want chivalry?Fine - give up abortion.
If you are willing to abort your own child, what the heck will you be willing to do to ME when the chips are down? Chivalrous men consider pro-choice women complete jerks. 

Maybe that's why you can't find a chivalrous man - if he doesn't care about his child, he's probably not going to care a lot about you either.

And a gentleman unknown to me added his two cents:

Arenotamso • parent   You want to f#%k a guy up? Have him hold the door of the abortion clinic for his girlfriend when she's getting an abortion he doesn’t want and has no say in for the supposedly bombproof reason that it is her body (“it” with no antecedant). That destroyed me for years. No one forced me to hold that door. I was trying to be chivalrous in my own confused and misguided way. Could I let her face it by herself? Was I sending a mixed message to her? No. She knew I hated what she was doing. But she was a southern lady who, like the author of this article, appreciated being treated like a lady. She lives with her decision. That she underwent it physically had to have been worse for her, but on the other hand she was able to comfort herself with lies, whereas I knew better. Abortion is a twisted business and you've really hit the nail on the head here by bringing it up in connection with chivalry because chivalry is the child of Christian culture, and Christian culture is born of Christian theology, and at the heart of Christian theology is the doctrine of the trinity, the triune nature of very God. The secular humanists and others who don’t identify themselves that way but also believe in "choice" cannot have chivalry AND abortion anymore than they can have, in the words of Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes, "the church of Jesus Christ Crucified without Jesus Christ."
    What relationship that countenances the murder of a baby can survive, or what state or kingdom survive that sanctions such murder? In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the murders Macbeth commits also destroy his relationship with his wife and drive them both mad. But what doomed image does Shakespeare present to us twice just before the murders to presage the shattering of this love and of an entire kingdom; what image symbolic of the triune love that represents the heart of every love but more obviously the heart of the erotic, if chaste, love of Chivalry? Both Macbeth and his Lady speak of it explicitly and in detail, and it is the image of a baby! This child is an aspect of every love as flesh, as possibility, and/or as spirit, but in all three cases is utterly real - if love itself be real; and if love not be real, then neither is the God of Christians.
   Though the Holy Spirit, unlike a baby, cannot be killed, it can be grieved, and if one has ever grieved the Holy Spirit, he or she knows that he or she would rather be dead, and be better off dead, than do it again.
   In conclusion, you are right: if chivalry is to live, so must the child unseen at the very heart of it, and to the heart of the discussion at hand goes your challenge: “Ladies, so you want chivalry? Give up abortion.”

On a related note, another commentator, obviously not Christian, played a few of the points I've been harping on for quite some time - as science advances, lives lengthen and societies become richer, women become increasingly unnecessary to society. From a population reduction perspective, none of the zero-growth people want women. Women tend to free-lance too many kids. Chivalry - respect for women - is precisely the thing the zero-growther wants to kill with a stake through the heart:

Nathan •

• −

Women don't seem to realize that they have lost an enormous amount of social value to men over the past century.  The need for many women to reproduce has drastically declined because agricultural and medical technologies have extended and enabled life far exceed previous possibilities.  In addition, the sexual revolution and subsequent legal enactments have placed virtually all of the power over reproduction in the hands of women, thereby devaluing those functions in the eyes of many men.  Women are no longer expected to fulfill any role that involves supporting a man or spending much of her time making him happy; you can certainly argue about the merits of that shift, but it causes women to have less value to men for the same reasons that a foreign-language translator is worth less to an employer if they do not speak Chinese. Women's (and men's) attractiveness has suffered a dramatic decline because of rampant obesity.  The advent of pornography has nearly eliminated the necessity of a woman in order for a man to experience sexual gratification.
So women aren't needed very much from a reproductive standpoint.  They aren't desirable from a relationship standpoint.  They aren't as desirable from an attractiveness standpoint.  And they aren't needed from a sexual standpoint.
Setting aside all of the issues related to the breaking of the social contract and the unfairness of placing expectations on men and not women, the simple question remains: what on earth makes you women think you're worth it anymore?  Why would you think that we care about what you think you deserve?

• −

Why the HHS Mandate Will Stand

After John Roberts had to violate the Law of Non-Contradiction (ObamaCare is now both a tax and not a tax at the same time and in the same manner), I don't see any particular reason the HHS Mandate would be struck down.

ObamaCare stands because the government CANNOT use the commerce clause, but CAN use its taxing authority. So, ObamaCare is NOT a tax when we vote for it or pay it, but it IS a tax when it is considered as to its constitutionality.

The HHS Mandate can absolutely work the same way.

The Mandate would, in this scenario, just be part of Congressional taxing authority. When a church is using an insurance company, Congress can tax the insurance company. And when the church is acting as its own insurance company, it is, for purposes of the mandate, an insurance company first, not a church.

So, while Congress cannot tax a church, it CAN tax an insurance agency, even if it turns out that the insurance agency is a church (that is, the church is insuring itself). The HHS Mandate would be legal to enforce upon churches because the Congress is taxing an insurance company, not a church.

See how easy that was?

Now that Roberts has demonstrated that he's stark, raving mad, there is no "constitutional" reason to think the HHS Mandate will not stand.

Killing Them Softly

I've written here, here and here on the connection between infant mortality, abortion and economics.
Today, I'm going to take a slightly different emphasis by adding in the problem of maternal mortality.

By clicking on this link to the UN Chart, and this one to the CIA chart, you can follow along with how maternal mortality fits into this discussion and verify what I'm saying. The headers on each table are sortable - just click on the header and it will sort by that column.

Before I begin the discussion, a few things should be mentioned.

1) Infant mortality
Infant mortality is usually defined as the number of children who die in their first year per 1000 live births. Numbers on infant mortality are not apples-to-apples - the United States counts any child born breathing as a living child, but most countries don't. If the child is below a certain weight, below a certain gestational age or dies within the first day or week of life, it is often not counted in infant mortality statistics. In Russia, if it dies in the twelfth month, the death is often transferred into child mortality statistics.

Many countries do not keep hard statistics - the numbers we have for them are guesswork based on various known models and factors, like the number of hospitals, midwives, doctors, obstetrics wards, general level of medical care, etc.

2) Maternal mortality and abortion
Maternal mortality is the number of women who die per 100,000 childbirths. Notice the difference. Infant mortality uses a scale 100 times smaller than maternal mortality uses.

But, like infant mortality, maternal mortality numbers are also not apples-to-apples, and for many of the same reasons. For instance, in the United States, women who die of a botched abortion are often classified as being a maternal death instead of an abortion death. We can assume maternal deaths in other countries are often wrongly classified or not kept up-to-date. For instance, abortion is a killer of both women and children, but the only numbers we have for Venezuala's "abortion rate as a percentage of pregnancy" date from 1968.

In short, countries often have a difficult time tracking this kind of information or don't track it at all. Again, maternal mortality is often generated by modeling, because it is simply not possible to accurately count maternal deaths in most circumstances.

3) Different countries are tracked differently
Finally, the UN and the CIA track different countries - the CIA tracks any self-governing body, but the UN only tracks member nations. So, for instance, Monaco shows up in the CIA list, but not in the UN list.

And different models give different results for the same country: Finland is ranked fifth in infant mortality on the UN list, but twelfth on the CIA Factbook list. Luxembourg is seventh on the UN list, but 32nd on the CIA list. And these disagreements are just in the top 30, where statistics are pretty solid. You can imagine how uncertain the rank is for countries farther down on the list.

In short, don't treat the decimal points and the rankings as hard and fast. Assume a general grouping is roughly accurate and that's the best anyone can do. Now, on to the discussion.


The Discussion
Scan through either table when it is sorted by infant mortality, and you instantly see what abortion supporters have all along claimed: generally speaking, countries with no restrictions on abortion have the lowest infant mortality.

Now, there are exceptions. On the CIA table, for instance, in the top 50 countries, six absolutely prohibit abortion. Likewise, on the same table, in the bottom 50 countries, seven have either no restrictions, or have relatively loose restrictions like "mental health" and "socio-economic" reasons. Still, the top 50 countries list 44 whose who have no restrictions on abortion, but who have low infant mortality rates.

How do they do it?
Easy.
They cheat.

Consider: prior to the advent of modern medicine, children with serious abnormalities or born into seriously dysfunctional families would die in their first year. Indeed, this is the rationale for legal abortion in many countries, including our own: we euthanize the child in the womb because the physical problems would kill the child soon after birth anyway, or the parents would be so disgusted with the child that neglect or active abuse would soon result in the child's death.

Let us accept such arguments on their face. If this is true, then when we take abortion out of the infant mortality calculation, we artificially lower the infant mortality rates. We actively kill children BEFORE birth who would not long have survived AFTER birth. Properly speaking, if we take abortion proponents at their word, abortion should be counted as part of infant mortality statistics.

Now, in order to do this, we have to know what percentage of pregnancies are being aborted. Not all countries track this number, but many attempt to. If you click on the "% of Pregnancies that end in abortion" column header twice,  you'll see them all there, listed in descending order.

Now, "percent" means "per one hundred". So, since infant mortality is counted in deaths per 1000, and number of aborted pregnancies is per 100, we would have to take the "% of Pregnancies that end in abortion" and multiply it by ten to get the number of abortions per thousand pregnancies.

I did that and added it to the infant mortality rate to get "Total Infant Death Rate per thousand".

Click on "Total Infant Death Rate per thousand" to see what happens.
Notice that infant mortality for all countries now sends the countries with no restrictions to the bottom of the heap. For instance, the United States moves from about 49 to around 199 out of 222 countries.

The Effect of Maternal Mortality

But this is unfair. Pro-lifers are always accused of ignoring the women who die due to pregnancy and childbirth, so we need to factor that in. We will. Keep in mind that any death due to a botched abortion is going to get counted as "maternal mortality", so we aren't missing any deaths when we do this calculation. 

Now, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) is figured in deaths per 100,000 births. We need to get the number of maternal deaths per 1000 births. That is, we need to use the same scale we use for infant mortality. So, we have to divide the maternal mortality figure for each country by 100, then add the result to the number of infant deaths to get the true body bag count for both mother and child from pregnancy and birth.

That's what I did. I added the new "MMR per 1000" figure to the "Total Infant Death Rate per thousand" and generated the "Mother and infant deaths: Total per 1000 births" column.

So, sort the tables by the last column "Mother and infant deaths: Total per 1000 births" and you'll see the result. Notice it has changed virtually nothing.

Even though countries like Afghanistan and the Central African Republic see tremendous mortality - over 1500 women die per 100,000 births - the number of mothers who die per 1000 births is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of babies being aborted.  

According to the Lancet, a woman in the hell-hole of Afghanistan has about 1.5% chance of dying as a result of becoming pregnant or giving birth (15 per 1000). There are only five countries in the world where that chance is above one percent. 

Conclusion

So, once everything is added in, a remarkable view emerges. Afghanistan is about as sophisticated as Germany, Finland and Iceland when it comes to preventing pregnancy-related deaths. The Central African Republic is actually doing quite a bit better than any of the European luminaries that they are told to imitate. Indeed, there's only one significant difference between the Afghanis and Africans versus the Europeans: the Afghanis and Africans have a high death rate, but don't intend it. The Europeans? Well...

Two centuries ago, infant mortality ranged from 100 to 250 per 1000 live births. Today, nearly every "advanced" country with unrestricted abortion has an infant death rate above that level. Maternal death rates are high in countries which prohibit or severely restrict access to abortion. However, if we don't cheat on the infant mortality equations, the total pregnancy-related death rate is typically higher in "legal abortion" first world countries than it is in "abortion prohibited" third world countries.

The "civilized" world is actively killing it's own at a rate greater than or equal to the worst hell-hole on this planet. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes us civilized.

The Curious Case of World Population

No matter what else one may argue, one thing is clear: Western culture doesn't value babies. At one time, it did. What changed?

Let's take a look.

Pre-Industrial Family Life

In ancient pagan Rome, average life expectancy at birth was about 25 years of age. If the child survived to its 10th birthday, life expectancy was 51.That average life expectancy was pretty much standard around the world for the next two millennia.

What does that mean?
It means a lot of children died before the age of ten.

Infant mortality is generally defined as the number of children per 1000 who die before their first year.Modern estimates indicate that for pre-industrial societies between 200 and 300 infants per 1000 would die in their first year.

In the early 1600s in England, two-thirds of children died before their fourth birthday.  40% of children in colonial America didn't reach age 18.
In 1740's London, 75% died before they were five.

Maternal death was significant, but not predominant. It accounted for about 10% of deaths for women between the ages of 15 and 44, that is, four to seven women died per thousand births (tending more towards four than seven).

The more children a woman had, the more likely she was to survive into old age. Only celibate women lived longer then those who had more than five children.

Age at First Marriage: Ancient and Medieval
For most of human history, parents chose the spouses for their children. 

In the Roman Empire, the age of first marriage for pagan girls was 12-15, pagan men 26. Christian women were nearly 19 at first marriage, while Christian men were 27.

Medieval marriages tended to be later: females 23 and males 28, but younger marriages were not uncommon.

St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. Only six of of the 14 children he and Eleanor had survived.

Upwards of one-quarter of the medieval population were under religious vows and therefore celibate.

Age at First Marriage: Colonial Americas
In the southern United States, the legal age of marriage for females was 14.
In colonial America, one in ten women age 16 were married. Average age of marriage for women was 19. Over the next 150 years, it would slowly rise to 23, dropping back down to 20 only briefly around 1960.

In Catholic colonial Mexico, legal age of marriage was set by canon law at 12, as it had been for centuries  In Mexico, over 50% of the females in the non-Spanish population were married by age 16, over 50% of the males married by age 18.

Marriage Didn't Last Long
Most families lost at least one parent by the time the eldest child reached 21 years of age. Marriages lasted on average less than 12 years because, about 50% of the time, one of the spouses was dead by what would have been the 12th year of marriage.

In comparison, newlyweds in 2006 had a 57% chance of being divorced before their 15th anniversary. 

Think about this.
It doesn't mean that modern sacramental marriages shouldn't last, but it does mean that Christ is asking modern spouses to do something today that earlier generations largely didn't have to do. Earlier generations had to watch their children and spouse die. We must help our children and spouse live.

Up to 40% Illegitimacy
Prior to the 1700s, roughly 20% of all women in England were pregnant at the time of first marriage. By 1750, that had risen to 40%. This wasn't just the fault of the Reformation.

Catholic Spain was considered missionary territory by St. Ignatius in part because fornication was common and accepted. Catholic Mexico had a 40% rate of illegitimacy in several cities.

Fertility
American women had unusually high fertility. Whereas English family had an average of three children per household (four if you were rich), Americans had seven to nine. Mothers typically hired wetnurses. Only five to seven children would survive to adulthood.

Summary of the Old Days

From Adam and Eve through Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Gregory the Great, the Muslim invasion of Spain, the Viking invasions, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent, the Little Ice Age... all the way until 1890, this is what it meant to live in a family.

• Your parents decided who you would marry. 
• Wealthier people tending to marry earlier since they had the means.
• About half of your children would die before they reached maturity.
• You or your spouse would be dead before surviving children reached maturity.
• Poor people tended to have fewer children than rich people.
• Most people (80% of the population) were farmers.
• Forming a family, keeping the family, raising the family, was incredibly hard work.
• The man sowed, raised and harvested the crops.
• The woman carried, bore and raised the children.
• You were as likely to lose your crop of children to famine as you were to lose your crop of wheat to insects, fungus or weather. A woman's work was just as valuable to society as a man's.

Family Life In the Last 150 Years

The germ theory of disease was not even considered reasonable until Pasteur's work in the 1860s. It did not become firmly ensconced as a science until Koch developed his postulates in 1890. That, along with industrialization and advances in transportation - and therefore advances in transport of food - changed everything. (As a point of contact, Leo XIII released his famous social justice encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891).

From 1890 to 1960, the age of marriage in the United States dropped.
From 1960 to now, it has climbed without interruption.

Infant mortality dropped in all countries around the world. In the United States, around roughly 1900, it dropped from 167 per thousand to the current 7 per thousand. This was fairly typical. By 1967, when we were awash in babies, we legalized abortion in order to crank the infant mortality rate back up to medieval levels.

As a result of increased infant survival, life expectancy across all countries throughout the world went up. Income across all populations around the world went up at the same time.

Today, we marry later, our spouses largely don't die, our children don't die (so we have to murder them via abortion), and we are incredibly richer.

Malthus Makes An Entrance
Thomas Malthus, the first man to worry about the problem of overpopulation, lived in a society that valued women and children. He believed that the wealthier you were, the more children you would have. Between 1798 and 1826, he published several successive editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He saw the rising affluence of England and of the West as a positive danger precisely because he thought rich people would have more children survive to adulthood than poor people did.

He couldn't imagine a society that would actively kill children - quite the opposite. He knew that parents would try to preserve the lives of their children.
He knew, with rising affluence, they would succeed. Their very success would create the danger - the rich people would over-run the earth with their children.
As rich people caused the population to rise, people would become more impoverished than they had to begin with, and famine would sweep the land. That's what he saw.

If we judge by Malthusian consequences, then nothing makes sense.

Counter-Intuitive
In fact, if we argue that the world of 1800 was overpopulated because of its impoverished population, then we must conclude the world has grown less and less overpopulated since 1800.

After all, the world has grown from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in population, yet instead of growing poorer, every corner of the world has become richer. Even the poorest billion people out of the current seven billion  live longer than did the richest one percent of that 1 billion alive in 1800. The remaining six billion alive today are inestimably richer than anyone was when the earth held only 1 billion.

Thus, judging by relative affluence, we are growing less overpopulated with time.

How is this possible?

As the population increases, as the number of human minds increase, technology improves. We are able to more fully use and spread the wealth of the world across the population. The tipping point was apparently 1 billion people. It just gets better from here on out.

There is, of course, one problem.
We may have become very wealthy, but we've lost our self-respect.

Earth Doesn't Need Women
When we were poor, when parents and children both died young, when family life was hard, we valued it. Now that we have grown rich, we have decided not to share our riches with the next generation.

Instead, we turned back the clock.

In the entirety of human history, century after century, millennium after millennium, there has been only one 70-year period, from about 1890 to about 1960, when the infant mortality rate fell below 100 per 1000 births anywhere in the world. It went from about 140 in 1900 to about 20 in 1960. For the first time in human history, we kept virtually all the children we conceived.

We saw what we had made, and we didn't like it. So, by pill, coil and cannula, we deliberately re-instated the pre-industrial infant death rates.

We currently abort about 230 babies per 1000 live births. This is the same infant death ratio one would see 1000 years ago in medieval Europe, before the advent of modern obstetrics, hospitals, germ theory. There's only one difference: we aren't watching them die from disease and famine - we're actively killing them. Before birth when we can, after birth if we must.

Family formation rates, fertility rates, child-bearing, is uniformly dropping, not just in rich countries but in every country in the world. And it has been doing this since the middle of the 1800s. You see, every country is getting richer. And, contrary to Malthus' expectations, rich people really don't want children.

Follow The Money
People the world over no longer want children, we want paychecks.
Just ask us. There's no need to live for children because family is no longer a life and death proposition.

But it gets worse.

What Will The Future Bring?
Looking over the last 150 years, we can see our social values have changed enormously.

Sex selection abortion is already rampant in India and China. We can't seem to pass a law against it in the United States. Why? Because women are the bearers of children. Women are dangerous as far as Malthusians are concerned. 

Today, we've already invented IVF. We are working to perfect the artificial gamete, the artificial womb, and the sex robot. Where do you think all that will lead?

Well, from the viewpoint of population control, it would be much better if we had no women at all. If women were gone, then all procreation could be regulated and controlled through industry and government. And this future is quite possible.

We could easily get to the point where most men settle for well-crafted robots, and living women are considered the peculiar pass-time of certain well-off gentlemen who like that kind of thing, in much the same way that some men keep horses or prefer golf to bowling. If you think this impossible, consider all the men in China and India who will never marry. There is a market for artificial women. As the technology improves, the market will grow.

This is what happens when we grow rich without growing holy.
This is what happens when we pursue social justice but ignore life issues.
Everyone gets rich, but our values... change.

The Future of Catholic Hospitals

Ann Barnhardt has an excellent essay on what the bishops need to do to fight the HHS Mandate.

But I think there's a twist here that she may have missed.
Barack Hussein Obama, our lovely Muslim president, is many things, but stupid is not one of them.

The HHS mandate is timed to come due right before the elections. It has always been timed to do this. Barack expended every bit of energy in his first year as President to make sure this happened. That's why ObamaCare had to be passed as soon as possible - he needed time to set up the HHS mandate. Sebelius did not pick the August 1st, 2012 mandate deadline out of thin air. The timing is crucial.

The mandate is designed to do two things:
1) Energize Barack's base right before the election,
2) Give the government the opportunity to take over every Catholic social service agency in the country.

If you think that idea expresses deep paranoia, I don't disagree.
That does not mean it is wrong.

Look, the man took over banks, he took over major players in the auto industry, for a lot less reason than this. Barack Hussein Obama is a fascist - he believes government should run everything.

Obamacare is designed to allow the government to take over the entire health care section of the economy.  The last provision goes into effect in 2018. The Baby Boomers began turning 65 in 2011. They first wave is turning 72 by 2018. Mandatory Social Security retirement age is 70.

Obamacare takes over just as the Baby Boomers begin to enter hospitals and nursing care facilities all across America's fruited plain.

Think of all the people who will be thrilled to see Baby Boomers in body bags.

The Green movement is just socialism for tree-dwellers. Socialists, whether national socialists or international socialists, have no problem with Holocausts. You have to break a few eggs to make a workers' paradise. Eco-fascists have long said there are too many people on this planet. That's a common refrain of the Green movement. They are happy to start the depopulation by getting rid of the useless old people, the Baby Boomers whom they have always hated. Barack absolutely agrees that old people should be killed. He said as much.



Obama is a huge fan of Islam. The Catholic Church has always been the major opponent of Islam. It has also been a major opponent of socialism and fascism.

But it gets better.

Obamacare needs hospitals in order to implement socialist, Green and Islamist policies, especially death panels. Catholic hospitals treat one in six people in the United States. Catholic hospitals are unlikely to implement Barack's agenda. These hospitals generate far too much good will among the lower classes. That cannot be permitted to continue. It makes the government look bad. It makes Islam look bad. It makes the Greens look bad. These Catholics must be stopped.

So, the HHS mandate sets up a win-win for Obama.  There are only three ways this can go: Catholic hospitals and social service agencies:

1. Roll over and play Obama's game. That's obviously fine. In this scenario, they've been co-opted. Obama gets what he wants. 
2. Refuse to implement Obama's agenda, and voluntarily shut themselves down. That's fine. It takes them out of the equation, and as Ann points out, it allows Obama to paint Catholics as evil creatures who would rather watch someone die in extreme agony than discard their silly moral objections.
3. Refuse to implement Obama's agenda and dare him to shut them down. That's fine. He won't shut them down, he'll take them over. Just like he did GM. Just like he did the banks. Only he won't give the hospitals back. They will, forever after, belong to the government. What a nice re-election present for Barack! A whole new line of hospitals all taken over in September or October, right before the election! And he will be taking them over for the people! He will be taking these wonderful hospitals away from the rich Catholic bishops! Barack will run them as they should be run, instead of according to stupid Catholic morality.

So, does Barack Obama expect Catholic bishops, Catholic hospitals, Catholic institutions to play along?
No.
He expects them to die.

This Is What Winning Looks Like

The infant mortality rate is calculated by dividing the number of infants who die within one year of birth by the number of infants who are born. The infant mortality rate is usually expressed as the ratio of infant deaths per one thousand live births.  

Prior to 1900, infant mortality rates of two and three hundred obtained throughout the world. The infant mortality rate would fluctute sharply according to the weather, the harvest, war, and epidemic disease. In severe times, a majority of infants would die within one year. In good times, perhaps two hundred per thousand would die. So great was the pre-modern loss of children's lives that anthropologists claim to have found groups that do not name children until they have survived a year. (emphasis added)

There is no reason to doubt the figures PBS provides above. There is reason to doubt the figure below:

The infant mortality rate started a long slide from 165 per 1,000 in 1900 to 7 per 1,000 in 1997.

In fact, this figure of 7 infant deaths per 1000 live births is a complete lie, a total fabrication. 

While it is the case that infant mortality began a long slide in this country from 165 per thousand in 1900, the legalization of abortion in the 1960's, and the nationwide legalization of in utero child murder in 1973, reversed that slide.

If we count abortion for what it is - infant mortality via infanticide - then the CDC shows us that our present infant mortality rate is identical to the rates seen before 1900.

The national legal induced abortion ratio increased from 196 per 1,000 live births in 1973 (the first year that 52 areas reported) to 358 per 1,000 live births in 1979 and remained nearly stable through 1981....  The ratio peaked at 364 per 1,000 live births in 1984 and since then has shown a nearly steady decline. In 2000, the abortion ratio was 245 per 1,000 live births in 49 reporting areas and 246 for the same 48 reporting areas available for 1999. This represents a 3.8% decrease from 1999 (256 per 1,000 live births) for the 48 reporting areas.

The pre-1900's rate of infant mortality was due to poor understanding of medical issues and relatively poor economic conditions. 


To what can we attribute our current high rate of infant mortality?
Well, we could blame the economy. 

It is true that the US economy underwent enormous inflation between 1965 and 1981, which might explain the high rates of infant mortality during that period.  It is certainly the case that the black community, which routinely kills the majority of its infants each year, is among the poorest in the nation. 


But blaming the economy seems somewhat disingenuous. After all, even the poorest country in the world today is richer than the richest country was in 1810. Even the poorest people in America are vastly better off than 90% of the rest of the world. Every American alive today is richer than John D. Rockefeller was in 1916. It's hard to say that poverty is the reason, because essentially no one in the world is poor, at least not when compared to 1810.  

We can make a very cogent argument that the Church's call to care for the poorest of the poor has not only been answered, but essentially completed. We won.

In terms of physical wealth and health, no one is as poor today as even the richest person was when Rerum Novarum was issued in 1891. The social justice people can sit down and enjoy their triumph. Everyone is wealthy, just as they say Leo XIII asked. 

No, it isn't the economy that is causing the high infant mortality rate. 

Rather, we seem to accept a high infant mortality rate today precisely because we are physically rich. We have the means to keep infants alive, we just choose not to use them. No matter where you go in the world, women's fertility is being systematically destroyed.  The number of children born to women each year is steadily dropping as the world's inhabitants becomes steadily wealthier. 

On average, the world over, the more money we have, the fewer children we have.

For most of human history, infant mortality has stood at around 300 per 1000. For a short century, between about 1880 and 1960, certain Western countries managed to get that rate down to just a dozen or so per 1000. 

We managed to become rich in children just as we were becoming rich in physical comfort. But, we didn't like having so many children around.

So, those same Western countries deliberately cranked infant mortality back up to where it has always historically been. No other country has ever managed to drop infant mortality to the exceedingly low rates the West has experienced, nor will they ever again. 

Why won't they? 

Because they'll abort their children out of existence as they become rich. The West has shown that it is acceptable to do that.

We won the war against physical poverty.
But, as the Fathers and Doctors of the Church liked to point out, physical poverty is nothing compared to spiritual poverty, the poverty of not knowing or living the Gospel.

We are indisputably physically wealthy.
Anyone who tells you different is either ignorant or deliberately lying.

But infant mortality is no different now than it was 1000 years ago, because the just distribution of physical riches was never really the problem.

The world over, there is a direct correlation between increased infanticide and "winning" social justice issues, that is, successfully redistributing physical wealth.

Someone might want to mention that to the bishops. 

It All Comes Down To Marketing

 With the release of the film "October Baby", many people are asking a new question: How common is abortion survival?

Well, let's make a comparison to something a little more well-known: the lynching of blacks in the United States. 


There are more than 3,500 known cases of whites lynching blacks between 1882 and 1968.

3500 lynchings in nearly a century.
That's an average of 83 deaths a year.

Well, that tells us the raw numbers, but out of what population? After all 83 deaths out of a population of 100 would be a lot worse than 83 out of a population of 100 million. 

So what was the black population between 1882 and 1968? This is rather harder to calculate. Mortality rates in the 1880's are rather worse than those in 1968, and the population skew is also different. However, we can safely say that most people alive in 1882 were not alive in 1968. 

In 1860 it was 4.4 million, by 1960 it was 18.9 million.

Since a smaller population makes the per capita lynching incidence look worse, we will calculate the total population in the way that makes the incidence of lynching look the most horrific: we'll just add the two numbers together, call it 25 million. This choice pretends the black population between 1860 and 1959 was a constant 4.4 million, and in 1960 was 18.9 million, but it makes the per capita rate the worst it can be.

So, let's say 25 million alive during that whole period.

Now, there have been roughly 52 million abortions in the last 50 years.

So, how many abortion survivors are there in the United States each year?  

We don't know for sure, since the United States does not even keep integrated statistics on abortion throughout all 50 states - virtually no one keeps statistics on survivors of abortion. 

The closest we can get is to look at a country with a comparable health system that does keep statistics.   According to the 2005 Confidential Enquiry into Child Health, 50 babies survived abortion in Britain in 2002. In 2002, there were 1,354 abortions performed after 22 weeks in Britain. That means that around 3.7% of children aborted after 22 weeks survived.

The figures for the CEMACH 2007 Perinatal Mortality report, gathered from hospitals in England and Wales during 2005, reveal 16 babies who survived abortion were born after 22 weeks in the womb or later in the pregnancy... in 2006, 2948 abortions were performed at over 20 weeks.  That would put the survival rate at .5 %.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1.4% of U.S. abortions take place at 21 weeks or later. There are 1.37 million abortions in the United States each year. That means 18,200 abortions after 21 weeks.

If Britain's baby survival percentage (.005 to .037) coincides across the Atlantic, then between 90 and  670 children survive abortion every year in the United States (1.4% of 1.3 million is 18,200 and 3.7% of 18,200 is 673).

Now, there's no reason to think US survival rates are different than UK survival rates.

But, let's be generous and say that our calculated abortion survivor numbers are 5 times higher than it should be, and it's really only between 18 and 135 survivals a year in the United States.

Alright.

So, America experienced 83 lynching deaths per year out of a total population of maybe 25 million versus somewhere between 20 and 135 abortion survivals a year out of a total population of 52 million abortions. If we went to straight per capita, that compares 83 deaths per 25 million vs 10 to 70 alive per 25 million.

Yep - if we drop the abortion survival rate by five in order to present a conservative estimate, the rates of black lynchings versus abortion survivors are essentially identical.
And that's if we are being generous.

If we were being honest, we would admit that there are MORE children surviving abortion each year than there were blacks being lynched each year. 

So why has everyone heard about black lynchings, but no one has heard about abortion survival?

It's all about marketing.