On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk writes "counter-intuitively, demographers generally find that the conditions necessary for people to choose fewer children include radically lower child, infant and maternal mortality. [...] The less certain you are your children will live to adulthood, the more likely you are to have more of them." This makes reassuring health care vital to a world that already has seven billion human mouths to feed. But should high technology be the automatic standard? Compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has a higher rate of death in childbirth—a rate that doubled between 1987 and 2006. Given proper pre-natal care, and access to emergency intervention, there may be safer (and less energized) places to have a baby than a hospital. Mark Hoofnagle challenges more assumptions on Denialism Blog, writing "We know abortion is more common where it is illegal. [...] Banning abortion does not save lives. It results in more abortions, and more lives lost." Some countries outlaw abortion even when the embryo implants outside the uterus, having little chance of survival and a good chance of killing its mother. Hoofnagle concludes, "The hypocrisy of calling this position pro-life is demonstrated by cold hard data. More women die. More fetuses are aborted."
- The Future - And Present - of Maternal and Infant Health Care. on Casaubon's Book
- What Illegal Abortion Looks Like on Denialism Blog
Posted to the homepage on February 13, 2012.
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