Massimiliano B wrote:Massimiliano B wrote:Interesting article:
http://www.jpands.org/vol18no2/calhoun.pdfABSTRACT
Introduction
National data on maternal and neonatal health sequelae over
more than 40 years of legal elective abortion in jurisdictions of
Great Britain are compared with data from the abortion-averse
jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Both
Irish jurisdictions show more favorable data than the British. The
Republic of Ireland has a maternal mortality rate over the last
decade of 3/100,000 compared with about 6/100,000 in England
and Wales; a stillbirth rate in 2010 of 3.8/1,000 live births
compared 5.1/1,000 live births in Great Britain; and a preterm (<
37 weeks) birth rate in 2010 of 42.7/1,000 live births compared
with 48/1,000 in England and Wales and 72/1,000 in Scotland.
Legal elective abortion is associated with higher rates of maternal
mortality rates, stillbirth rates, and preterm birth. Cerebral palsy
rates in Northern Ireland, at a prevalence rate for birth years 1981-
2007 of 2.3 per 1,000 live births (95% CI, 2.2-2.5), are low.
Do you think it's a serious research?
I'm a bit baffled by that.
Unsafe abortion is
not the only cause of maternal death. For example, according to WHO, in 2014 only 8% of maternal deaths have been caused by unsafe abortions, globally. So technically Ireland could've done worse in preventing deaths for unsafe abortions and better in preventing other causes of maternal death thus getting a better overall result than Britain.
So I'm quite taken aback by the fact that they can claim that
"legal elective abortion is associated with higher rates of maternal mortality rates, stillbirth rates, and preterm birth", how can they prove that it's only abortion and not some other factor which should be associated with a higher maternal death rate in Britain?
Moreover what does "associated" mean in this context? It's quite an ambiguous formula... I think we all know that "correlation does not imply causation", and usually most of statistical models can only show correlation, whereas it's much more difficult to identify causation.
Where abortion is illegal, maternal mortality rate is not higher than in countries where abortion is legal. Usually, people say the opposite.
I'm not sure 2 countries which have relatively similar life standards, are both western indutrialized nations and have many other things in common, are a good sample representative of all the countries on Earth.