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.

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. 

Really? Really?!?

You know, I couldn't make this stuff up.
I really couldn't.

It's like the start of a joke:

So, two ethicists walk into a bar publish an article claiming that newborns can be ethically killed because newborns are non-persons. "No different than an abortion," say our cute little experts.

And now the two pansies ethicists are upset because... wait for it... they perceive themselves as having received "death threats" from the commenters at TheBlaze.com

Can't have death threats against intellectuals.
It chills free speech, don'cha'know.

Of course, that begs the question: are all ethicists human?
Do they have any rights?

Someone should look into that.
We wouldn't want to make any mistakes on such an important topic, now would we?