About half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion:
“The 80 million unintended pregnancies that occur worldwide each year (38% of all pregnancies) can justifiably be deemed an “epidemic.” These pregnancies result in 42 million induced abortions and 34 million unintended births — births that contribute substantially to the annual world population growth of 78 million.”
For a person who believes abortion is murder, that looks like an epidemic of evil. For a person who believes in abortion rights, that looks like a huge need for abortion. If the amount of pregnancies where people were thinking about having abortions was very small and people usually had some sort of justification for them other than that they had caused a pregnancy before being ready for kids, I think the focus would shift to something common like child abuse.
Then again, it’s possible that the commonness of a particular problem isn’t a big factor in some of those people’s decisions to pursue abortion as an important cause. If it is, I think the drastic reduction in abortions that would happen if we made unintended pregnancy history would probably result in those people focusing on something else.
Drastically reducing unintended pregnancy might actually be pretty easy. This is because a leading reason for unintended pregnancy may be that a lot of people do not understand contraceptive efficacy statistics. For instance, condom efficacy studies are done in one year periods, which means they’re totally useless to help us determine whether they’re enough protection for the duration that we want protection for (like 20 or 30 years before the females become infertile). For all we know, the failure rate adds up over the years. For a 2% failure rate, that would mean something like 50% over one’s lifetime. (What statistic does that sound like?)
I tried and tried to find a condom study longer than one year and could not. I did encounter this other study on the aftermath of condoms as a sole method of contraception:
“Three hundred four women (78%) had used condoms for an aggregate total of 1178 years (average=3.9 years per woman; range=1 month-25 years). Seventy-eight women (25.6%) reported becoming pregnant while using condoms”
Drastically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies might be as simple as getting people to understand these statistics and encouraging them to use enough of the right methods in combination that they actually get the low failure rate they want.
It’s interesting therefore that most anti-abortion folk are not too enthusiastic about contraception. It’s almost as if they might be optimizing for something other than minimizing abortions, such as the promulgation of a particular moral order of society — one based on sin, guilt, and redemption — as against other ones such as harm minimization. If there is no harm, there need be no guilt and thus no redemption; harm reduction as a policy amounts to immanentization of the Eschaton.
Alright. I sometimes forget how irrational people can be. I have a question though: if unintended pregnancy were unheard of and people only considered abortions on rare occasions, do you think there would be as many people fighting about abortion?
(The people who do care about harm reduction could do this despite them.)
Rape comes to mind. Men cannot get pregnant from rape, and rape of men is played for laughter on TV. Hence it is that men are raped more often than women in the USA, and no one cares.
Really? blink (I quit watching television over a decade ago with the resolve that I was going to make my own life more interesting.)
Hence it is that men are raped more often than women in the USA, and no one cares.
I care. :/
I have met at least two men who have been raped. They were both raped by women, though, and not while in jail. This will probably immediately raise questions about how such a thing is possible. This page explains. (See the second and third points from the bottom.)
I’d have a hard time feeling bad for a serial killer being raped, but there are a lot of people in jail for things like drug possession and the idea of those guys being raped really bothers me.
Really? blink (I quit watching television over a decade ago with the resolve that I was going to make my own life more interesting.)
Yeah. It’s especially bad in media targeted at youngsters—I think Family Guy has made prison rape jokes more than once.
(I don’t watch much TV anymore either; there’s a long list of reasons, starting with apathy and torrenting, but somewhere on it appears ‘finds male rape amusing’.)
Yeah. It’s especially bad in media targeted at youngsters—I think Family Guy has made prison rape jokes more than once.
Ohhhhh. That I can believe. Not to say laughing at prison rape is okay, it isn’t, it’s just that when you made that comment, I envisioned people finding all male rape funny.
:/ I wouldn’t be surprised if some people do. So that still bothers me.
What have you gotten out of quitting TV? In addition to obvious things like more time for learning and self-improvement, it also helped my self-esteem to stop exposing myself to commercials designed to make me feel like I need a bunch of products to be “good enough”.
In addition to obvious things like more time for learning and self-improvement, it also helped my self-esteem to stop exposing myself to commercials designed to make me feel like I need a bunch of products to be “good enough”.
That was never really a problem for me. I’d say the time thing is the problem. Watching anime or movies on my laptop isn’t as enjoyable as on a TV, so I do less. (I waste a ton of time on IRC and websites, absolutely, so it’s not as if I replaced “watching TV” with “making the world a better place”—but I’d say those’re a better waste of time than TV.)
Patriarchy — in the sense of male control of women’s bodies — might not work, reproductively speaking; since forcing or obliging a woman to submit to sexual penetration would not convey reproductive success.
There would be an evolutionary pressure driving down the pain and danger of childbirth, in that women of families where childbirth was less painful and dangerous would be more likely to choose to become pregnant.
I don’t know if there’s a genetic, selected predilection to rape, but if there is, it would be diminished.
On the other hand, one of the demands of first-wave feminism was the right of wives to refuse sex with their husbands, on the grounds of the dangers and pains of pregnancy. This motive would not exist — so if there had been male dominance in politics, it might have persisted more strongly for longer.
On the gripping hand, patriarchy might demand pregnancy — for instance, shifting the focus of marriage from virginity to primiparity (first pregnancy): rather than considering a woman to belong to a man if she consents to sex with him, instead considering her his if she becomes pregnant by him. Thus much of the focus of courtship and romantic tropes would center around pregnancy; and likewise young male affirmations of another man’s manly success would focus on “you got her knocked up” rather than “you got in her pants”.
Okay, but:
Reference: U.S. Center for Disease Control: Unintended Pregnancy Prevention.
About half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion:
Reference: Assn. of Reproductive Health Professionals: The Potential of Long-acting Reversible Contraception to Decrease Unintended Pregnancy.
For a person who believes abortion is murder, that looks like an epidemic of evil. For a person who believes in abortion rights, that looks like a huge need for abortion. If the amount of pregnancies where people were thinking about having abortions was very small and people usually had some sort of justification for them other than that they had caused a pregnancy before being ready for kids, I think the focus would shift to something common like child abuse.
Then again, it’s possible that the commonness of a particular problem isn’t a big factor in some of those people’s decisions to pursue abortion as an important cause. If it is, I think the drastic reduction in abortions that would happen if we made unintended pregnancy history would probably result in those people focusing on something else.
Drastically reducing unintended pregnancy might actually be pretty easy. This is because a leading reason for unintended pregnancy may be that a lot of people do not understand contraceptive efficacy statistics. For instance, condom efficacy studies are done in one year periods, which means they’re totally useless to help us determine whether they’re enough protection for the duration that we want protection for (like 20 or 30 years before the females become infertile). For all we know, the failure rate adds up over the years. For a 2% failure rate, that would mean something like 50% over one’s lifetime. (What statistic does that sound like?)
I tried and tried to find a condom study longer than one year and could not. I did encounter this other study on the aftermath of condoms as a sole method of contraception:
Reference: Journal of Family Practice: Lifetime Patterns of Contraception and Their Relationship to Unintended Pregnancies
Drastically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies might be as simple as getting people to understand these statistics and encouraging them to use enough of the right methods in combination that they actually get the low failure rate they want.
It’s interesting therefore that most anti-abortion folk are not too enthusiastic about contraception. It’s almost as if they might be optimizing for something other than minimizing abortions, such as the promulgation of a particular moral order of society — one based on sin, guilt, and redemption — as against other ones such as harm minimization. If there is no harm, there need be no guilt and thus no redemption; harm reduction as a policy amounts to immanentization of the Eschaton.
Alright. I sometimes forget how irrational people can be. I have a question though: if unintended pregnancy were unheard of and people only considered abortions on rare occasions, do you think there would be as many people fighting about abortion?
(The people who do care about harm reduction could do this despite them.)
If unintended pregnancy were unheard-of, human sexuality and sexual politics would be vastly different in a lot of ways ….
Hmm. I bet you’re right. But what specifically do you think would be different?
Rape comes to mind. Men cannot get pregnant from rape, and rape of men is played for laughter on TV. Hence it is that men are raped more often than women in the USA, and no one cares.
Really? blink (I quit watching television over a decade ago with the resolve that I was going to make my own life more interesting.)
I care. :/
I have met at least two men who have been raped. They were both raped by women, though, and not while in jail. This will probably immediately raise questions about how such a thing is possible. This page explains. (See the second and third points from the bottom.)
I’d have a hard time feeling bad for a serial killer being raped, but there are a lot of people in jail for things like drug possession and the idea of those guys being raped really bothers me.
Yeah. It’s especially bad in media targeted at youngsters—I think Family Guy has made prison rape jokes more than once.
(I don’t watch much TV anymore either; there’s a long list of reasons, starting with apathy and torrenting, but somewhere on it appears ‘finds male rape amusing’.)
Ohhhhh. That I can believe. Not to say laughing at prison rape is okay, it isn’t, it’s just that when you made that comment, I envisioned people finding all male rape funny.
:/ I wouldn’t be surprised if some people do. So that still bothers me.
What have you gotten out of quitting TV? In addition to obvious things like more time for learning and self-improvement, it also helped my self-esteem to stop exposing myself to commercials designed to make me feel like I need a bunch of products to be “good enough”.
That was never really a problem for me. I’d say the time thing is the problem. Watching anime or movies on my laptop isn’t as enjoyable as on a TV, so I do less. (I waste a ton of time on IRC and websites, absolutely, so it’s not as if I replaced “watching TV” with “making the world a better place”—but I’d say those’re a better waste of time than TV.)
Some possibilities:
Patriarchy — in the sense of male control of women’s bodies — might not work, reproductively speaking; since forcing or obliging a woman to submit to sexual penetration would not convey reproductive success.
There would be an evolutionary pressure driving down the pain and danger of childbirth, in that women of families where childbirth was less painful and dangerous would be more likely to choose to become pregnant.
I don’t know if there’s a genetic, selected predilection to rape, but if there is, it would be diminished.
On the other hand, one of the demands of first-wave feminism was the right of wives to refuse sex with their husbands, on the grounds of the dangers and pains of pregnancy. This motive would not exist — so if there had been male dominance in politics, it might have persisted more strongly for longer.
On the gripping hand, patriarchy might demand pregnancy — for instance, shifting the focus of marriage from virginity to primiparity (first pregnancy): rather than considering a woman to belong to a man if she consents to sex with him, instead considering her his if she becomes pregnant by him. Thus much of the focus of courtship and romantic tropes would center around pregnancy; and likewise young male affirmations of another man’s manly success would focus on “you got her knocked up” rather than “you got in her pants”.