By the same token, it’s not surprising that countries that have a high incidence of abortion have lower mortality rates for mothers (although, obviously, not for babies) as countries where social norms and/or the medical climate make that more difficult.

Look, imagine two countries, Access and Noaccess. Access has a lot of access to birth control, so women control their reproduction as they please; the average mother has two children. Noaccess is run by religious fanatics who have outlawed all forms of family planning, so the average mother has 10 children.

Now suppose that both countries have an identical chance of maternal mortality “per birth.” What does this mean?

Well, it means that in reality, mothers are five times (or as you put it, “5X”) as likely to die in childbirth in Noaccess as in Access. Yet if we measure risk the way Hindrocket suggests - paying attention only to “per birth” risk - we would conclude that there’s no difference at all in maternal risk between Access and Noaccess.

Save the Children’s method shows that there’s a significant difference between Access (X) and Noaccess (5X). Hindrocket’s gives the illusion that there is no difference at all.

In what possible way would a measure that could ignore a five-times difference in risk be better or more logical?

“In countries in which the health care system doesn’t provide women the ability to control when and how many children they have, mothers have birth earlier and more often, and both mothers and infants are more likely to die in the process.”

Well, which is it? If having babies “more often” makes mothers “more likely to die,” that sounds to me like the number of babies born per women is quite relevant. Right?

Plus, I don’t know where you’re getting the figure that the US was “29th” on Maternal Mortality Ratio. The document you link doesn’t appear to provide rankings at all for that measure. It merely states each countries “maternal mortality ratio,” i.e., maternal deaths per 100,000 births. The number for the US in 1995 was 12. And I count only 16 countries that come in under 12 (leaving aside a few “countries” like Malta that don’t have enough births to count).

Automobile accident fatalities are almost always looked at as “per 1000 miles driven” or some such rather than in aggregate.

We wouldn’t look at China and say that they are wealthier than, say, Sweden because their GDP is higher. We would look at GDP/capita instead to realize that China is in fact quite poor, just highly populated.

While your point about lack of access is valid, the measurement isn’t if we can’t isolate the problem. While I’m sure that abortion politics plays a role in why Americans have higher birth rates than, say, Sweden, there are all sorts of reasons why Americans have more kids. Some are demographic, some are social, some are medical, etc.

Let me posit an example: Country A has an average 3 childbirths per mother, per lifetime with a (made up) .002% chance of death per child, or a .006% lifetime risk. Country B has an average one childbirths per mother, per lifetime but a .006% chance of death per child, or a .006 lifetime risk. You’re saying those countries are identical?

Oh, good grief…

As I said in my post (and as you also point out here), this does have the possibility of miscounting by including countries that shouldn’t have been included; but that’s also true of the 25 countries that seem to be doing better than the US measured by lifetime mortality.

Really, you Lefties need to stop complaining and look on the bright side more. And this whole confusion of Blacks with people ? Cut it out. No one’s fooled. :D

James writes:

Let me posit an example: Country A has an average 3 childbirths per mother, per lifetime with a (made up) .002% chance of death per child, or a .006% lifetime risk. Country B has an average one childbirths per mother, per lifetime but a .006% chance of death per child, or a .006 lifetime risk. You’re saying those countries are identical?

In terms of the likelihood of any individual mother dying during as a result of childbirth, the two countries are identical. In other terms, of course, they’re not identical; but if what you care about is the likelihood of a mother dying, obviously they are identical. .006% is equal to .006%.

When it comes to specific improvements to be made to each of those countries, of course the differences you’re talking about matter a lot. But when it comes to measuring how bad the mother-mortality problem is, both countries are equally badly off.

On the other hand, go back to my example of NoAccess and Access. Mothers in Noaccess have a 10X chance of dying in childbirth in their life, compared to mothers in Access. Are you saying there’s no difference between these two countries? Because that’s what your preferred measure says.

An aside: Where are you getting this notion that people (or blacks) in the U.S. don’t have “access” to birth control? Ever been in a gas station restroom? Maybe a lot of people in the U.S. don’t want to use birth control, but that’s their choice.

The only thing I’ve said about blacks and access is this: “In effect, measured by their access to high-quality health care, blacks in the US are living in a ‘developing nation,’ not an ‘industrialized nation.’”

1) In your previous post, you point out that American whites have a very low maternal mortality rate, and that the real reason the overall American rate is higher than other industralized countries is because the black mortality rate is comparatively high.

2) Then, in the current post, you mention “access to birth control” several times as a key contributor to women having more children and thereby dying more often in childbirth.

So, putting 1 and 2 together, if American blacks are 1) dying more often in childbirth because of 2) having more children, you have clearly blamed that fact on, among other things, lack of access to birth control.

To which I say, huh? Who doesn’t have access to condoms, at the very least? Not that condoms are “perfect” or “infallible” (to quote Amy S.’s irrelevant response), but they do work most of the time and everyone has access to them, right? How is it the health care system’s fault if some people choose not to use condoms?

The bigger picture, however, is that the US should be considered a low-birth nation, just like those others. A nation like Niger has a birth rate of 50/1000, for instance. By any reasonable measure, the US is a low-birthrate nation.

Stats via the CIA World Factbook.

In Country A, people are at risk of dying in a car accident at the rate of .00001 per every mile driven. But people in Country A drive only 5,000 miles per year per person, which gives each person a .05 chance of dying in a car accident.

In Country B, people are at risk of dying at the rate of .000005 per every mile driven. But people in Country B drive an average 20,000 miles per year per person, which gives them a .1 chance of dying in a car accident.

Is it 1) helpful or 2) informative merely to put out the statistic that people in Country B are “twice as likely to die in a car accident” (i.e., by comparing the .1 figure to the .05 figure) while ignoring fact that people in Country B drive 4 times as many miles per person? Clearly not.

One, no matter which way you slice and dice it, the US is well down the list when it should be at the top given its vaunted medical facilities;

and Two, no matter whether it’s per birth or per lifetime, dead is dead for these poor mothers — shouldn’t we be concerned that our extremely expensive medical facilities let them die? And shouldn’t we do something about it?

1) I never said that the high infant or mortality rate among American blacks was due to a high birthrate; I said it was due to a lack of access to high-quality medical care.

2) I never said that there was a high birthrate among American blacks.

3) I never said that that high birthrate (which I never even said existed) was due to a lack of access to birth control in the US.

4) Although I did say that lack of access to birth control is a key factor, I never said it was the only factor, or that high birth mortality could never exist due to other factors.

Please stick to replying to what I write in the future, rather than replying to stuff I never said.

Is it 1) helpful or 2) informative merely to put out the statistic that people in Country B are “twice as likely to die in a car accident” (i.e., by comparing the .1 figure to the .05 figure) while ignoring [the] fact that people in Country B drive 4 times as many miles per person? Clearly not.

First of all, the Save the Children report didn’t “merely… put out” one statistic. They considered a large number of statistics, including other statistics that do measure outcomes per bith (albeit for infants, not for mothers). To imply they just put out a single, contextless statistic is unfair.

Second of all, in your example, I’d say it depends upon the details. If the economy and infrastructure of country B is organized in such a way so that people essentially have no choice but to drive 4 times as much as they do in country A, then yes, I’d say the deathrate is the relevant statistic.

Part of what determines how likely women are to die in childbirth is whether the social, legal and economic factors in a country are organized to let them control their reproduction or not. When countries are organized in a way that doesn’t let women control their reproduction, that is dangerious; and the result is that women are more likely to die due to childbirth. It is both correct and appropriate that at least one of the many statistics Save the Children collected reflect that fact.

Finally, I don’t know why (some) people are spinning this as an anti-US thing. Although of course we can (and should) do better - especially for minority women - overall the US is one of the best countries for women. And a major reason for that is that women here control their birthrates (and as a result have a relatively low birthrate).

Could any of my conservative visitors explain why you think Suzy’s risk of dying in childbirth in her life is an irrelevant statistic, which should never be measured?

Could any of my conservative visitors explain why you think Suzy’s risk of dying in childbirth in her life is an irrelevant statistic, which should never be measured?
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I just don’t know man. I used to be a liberal. But let me try my best to go ahead and answer you. Why don’t we think Suzy’s risk of dying in childbirth in her life is relevant?

There is no Suzy here. There are only a mess of statistics. Statistics do not have predicitive value, especially mass statistics from a whole country are used. Let me repeat that. You cannot go from statistics->probability in one step. In fact going from data to a theory about the general principal involved requires something called science, which I’ll get to in a sec.

I want to finish about relevant statistics:
Known probabilities (for instance the 50% heads/tails of a coin toss) are usually borne out by statistics, if repeated enough times and taking place under control. However, as anyone of you must know (i hope), it doesn’t work the other way. Statistics do not necessarily reveal probabilities. If you have not heard this before it might take a sec, I know it shocked me at first when I got this. So here it is: once you have a statistic, that is when the science starts. You need to take data and start to piece it together with other data to get a better and better picture of what is really happening. Otherwise you will make mistakes in your understanding. Sometimes huge mistakes, such as believing in communism, or in practicing pacifism in the face of an expansionist facist menace, are made this way. You cannot take Feelings + Statistics and make Understanding to Act Upon. You must take all the statistics and start the process of building understanding. Ok so far?

So we have no Suzy here, and we have no probabilities of her lifetime risk. What he have is a whole damn mess of women who died during childbirth, compared to a vaguely specified total number of other women, and that’s all.

Now what IS relevant are the obvious questions: What is the total number of other women?
Are we comparing to all women, all births, all women who gave birth, etc? What exactly do we know?

In my experience, it is having this sort of “productive” thought process mocked and jeered by our fellow liberals that drove most people like me to the other side. But we still get suckered in by these sorts of productions because we still, despite our best efforts, have bleeding hearts. When we hear of a problem in America, or anywhere, we want to see how to fix it, and avoid having a huge mistake made by people who really wanted to make that mistake and used the problem as an excuse.

And, with that as the background, we noticed that in this study, the data is presented so that higher birthrates are part of the problem. Access to birth control and abortion are being pushed as the solution, in addition to socialized medical care for everyone.

Do you see how annoying that is for us? We got sucked in with examining how to make childbirth safer for women, and then we find out that the point is to have less babies and make on the “huge mistakes” I was mentioning with regard to our whole world-renowned medical system.

I hope I’ve said enough. In conclusion: we love Suzy. We hate misuse of data. It would be fine to measure womens total lifetime mortality, maybe even directly come out and correlate it to birthrate and access to abortion, if that interests you. DO NOT use the fact that having more babies puts women universally at more risk to exaggerate maternal mortality into a “Crisis” that will provoke more huge mistakes, such as govenment funded abortion availability, or socialized health care.

And I don’t speak for any conservatives who disagree with me on these things, of course.