Abortion and abortion’s apologists have succeeded in twisting and distorting even a once-objective, just-the-facts, and statistically-oriented discipline as Public Health. In the not-so distant past, pregnancy was defined in medical textbooks as the result of fertilization of egg by sperm. Now it’s defined as implantation of the embryo in the uterus. Semantics? Hardly.
This represents a fundamental shift that protects the in vitro fertilization industry. If pregnancy is defined by implantation, then there is hardly an ethical hurdle when it comes to sifting through dozens of embryo’s in search of the ‘most fit’. Some might call them ‘keepers’. The rest may simply be discarded.
The in vitro fertilization industry and its related embryonic stem cell research industry, which makes use of ‘leftover’ embryos in frozen storage, serve as a bulwark for abortion, appealing to utilitarian sentiments regarding the alleviation of emotional and physical suffering, respectively.
Even defining something as simple as infant mortality has become a semantic three-ring circus.
Case in point: CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released a study this past November entitled, Behind International Rankings of Infant Mortality: How the United States Compares with Europe. The Bottom line is that the U.S. ranks 30/31 nations in the study in infant mortality rates.
A look at figure #1 in the study doesn’t inspire confidence as the study bills itself as a comparison between the U.S. and Europe, but goes on to include Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Cuba.
Table #1 inspires even less confidence as it details what constitutes ‘live births’ in the countries under study. The following countries take the most expansive definition of ‘live birth’ to include any birth of a living baby without regard to gestational age:
Austria, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United States.
Norway, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland are listed as having varying reporting criteria, including a 500 gram birthweight, gestational age, and in the Czech Republic, the added requirement that the infant survives the first 24 hours.
No mention at all of the remaining 12 countries in the study.
Additionally, the study claims, “Differences in national birth registration notwithstanding, there can also be individual differences between physicians or hospitals in the reporting of births for very small infants who die soon after birth.”
It’s difficult to compare nations to one another when the very definition of ‘live birth’ is up for grabs, when different nations take a more or less aggressive approach to saving the life of the neonate.
These approaches also have much to do with who is paying the bill. Governments with socialized medicine and flat economies have a powerful disincentive to attempt aggressive, costly life-saving measures, and may well be more apt to recommend abortion in cases where fetal anomalies are detected, further skewing the data.
Of course this study neglects to mention those realities.
They’re not politically correct.
“This represents a fundamental shift that protects the in vitro fertilization industry.”
The changing of the definition of pregnancy protects more than just that.
If a human life starts at implantation then contraception doesn’t kill a human being.
So a baby unable to implant in the wall of it’s mother’s uterus isn’t a baby – it’s simply a bunch of cells.
And if it’s not a baby until then, well maybe it’s not a baby until 23 weeks.
Even though babys born at 20 weeks have survived.
We even have people now claiming that babies are “hollow” until 23 weeks. Funny thing, in saline abortions which were done before 23 weeks, women did not deliver hollow sacks that looked like babies……
They were really flesh and blood babies with soft skeletons, hearts, brains and guts.
So really, this is all about placating our consciences as we head down the slope towards a totalitarian society where only the perfect are allowed to live and those no longer deemed useful are scavenged for body parts and human experimentation.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how the younger generations who have survived abortion are going to deal with their parents and grandparents who allowed all this to happen. Very interesting indeed.
Frankly, its a little hard to follow the latter part of the article. The first part is a straightforward expression of the perspective from which the author will proceed. The part on in vitro fertilization is a straightforward expression of the belief that a human being entitled to full legal protection exists from the moment of conception — with implications which naturally follow from that premise. (Incidentally, we may have some points of agreement on the merits of in vitro fertilization — but those would be a distraction to either of us here.)
But the matter of which figures become muddled how, and what exactly abortion has to do with it, is itself muddled. If an abortion took place, I infer that the pregnancy would appear in neither the numerator nor the denominator of the infant mortality rate. Are you saying that it should appear in both? At times you appear to be saying that certain countries should not be included in the sample, but its not clear why. That there can be differences between physicians, hospitals, and national statistical agencies is obvious, but I’m not clear on what those differences have to do with your concerns for the pro-life movement.
I kind of agree with Siarlys on this one. You are making an assumption that places with socialized medicine give inferior neonatal care without offering any proof. Not to mention that even places with socialized medicine also have a private option for the wealthier.
A much bigger reason that the United States has had a higher infant mortality rate than other industrialized nations for such a long-time is because of the midwife/obgyn difference. Most births in Europe and Japan are handled by midwives with minimal interventions; however, in the U.S. most births are treated as “high-risk” with multiple unnecessary interventions that risk child and mother.
barboo 77 I would say that also one of the reasons infant mortality rate is so high in the US is that many poor women don’t have access to prenatal care during pregnancy.
I also agree with you that the way we, in North America treat pregnancy and labor is not helpful.
Well off mothers today often opt for cesarean sections to time their delivery and these deliveries carry more risk.
Many women are obsessed with how much weight they gain during pregnancy and don’t gain enough.
There is also a subsection of women who need fertility treatments which sometimes results in smaller, low birthweight babies.
Then factor in the number of women who have had abortions in America. With 1.5 million abortions per year in America, year after year this represents a significant portion of child-bearing women.
Abortion has now been shown to be a prime indicator of subsequent premature babies and higher risk of infant mortality. This risk is not yet widely acknowledged nor accepted by American society.
There is also the effect of delaying having a first child. Women have placed careers and education first, delegating marriage and family for their later years. Older women have a greater risk in pregnancy both to themselves and their babies. I can speak from experience that it’s much easier to have a baby in your late 20′s than in your late 30′s!
Hey, we have all kinds of ground for agreement here.
Natural delivery on a natural schedule beats optional caesarian anytime, and midwives at home is fine unless there are known complications — although its a good idea for a doctor to check up a few times during pregnancy. Pre-natal care not being available to many women is a huge factor.
When it comes to delaying the first child, that is one more reason we have to break the economic factor that people are expected to have a continuous work history in order to be hired and make progress in their profession. If there is such a thing, we need to enforce that employers relax and lighten up. If a woman could, e.g., marry and have a child while studying law part-time, then expect to start part-time work in her profession when her oldest child is ten or so, then move to full time when the youngest child is sixteen, or whatever suits her and the maturity of her particular children, we’d have lots more healthy options. Ditto for men, who should be spending more time with their children in the early years.
But the pressure is all for men and women to spend their best child-bearing and child-raising years making a place for themselves in their professions by showing they will “put the company first” and can put in sixty hour weeks, then they can relax about the time the kids are grown — which is backwards. They won’t even have grandchildren to relax with, because their kids will be delaying families in order to build their careers. When grandma and grandpa are getting too old to keep up with the grandkids, here they come.
Then, later in life child-bearing increases the incidence of Down’s syndrome, raising an inflammatory issue that wouldn’t even come up so often if child-bearing were more concentrated in the healthiest years.