Reproduction, Birth Control, and Abortion Politics
purepedantry | August 7, 2008Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about abstinence.
The study followed around 300 teenagers from Seattle over a year after interviewing them about their attitudes about sex and abstinence and their intentions to have sex or abstain. They wanted to know how their initial attitudes and intentions about sex and abstinence interacted over time…
purepedantry | February 20, 2008The demographic transition -- the tendency for richer societies to have fewer rather than more children -- is, I think, most often attributed to social causes. For a variety of reasons -- because each child costs more, because they are more likely to survive and take of parents in old age, because of social stigma associated with large families, because of birth control, etc. -- couples in richer countries often choose to have 2 children rather than 10. This demographic transition accounts for the increasing age of the population in Western countries, as I discussed in an earlier post.
I…
purepedantry | February 12, 2008The NYTimes published two articles about abortion in the last couple days. The first was a review by William Saletan of the book Embryo, A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. The second was an article about the science of trying to detect pain in infants and possibly fetuses as well.
The two juxtaposed reminded me of the tendency of the abortion debate in this country to degenerate into moral absolutes -- and simplistic ones at that. This is the subject of the Saletan article, but I believe it also applies to discussions of fetal pain.
In the Saletan…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008This question came down the pipeline from the SEED overlords:
Why don't they make a birth control pill for men?
The short answer is that they do make various methods of contraception for men, but most of the more effective ones are surgical rather than pharmacological. Also, given the early difficulties in making a pill for men similar to the birth control pill for women, most of the pharmacological forms of male contraception are still in clinical trials to determine that they are safe and effective.
The history of a male birth control is filled with many false starts. For example, the…
purepedantry | September 24, 2007The US government spends millions domestically and billions internationally on abstinence-only education with the intent of lowering the transmission of STIs such as HIV and limiting unwanted pregnancies. Yet abstinence-only education is demonstrably ineffective. The alternative called abstinence-plus education clearly does not make the situation worse -- as some critics have argued -- but it doesn't appear to work that well either. What's a person concerned with public health to do?
Two reviews this year Underhill et al. look at the effectiveness of abstinence-only and abstinence-plus…
purepedantry | June 20, 2007Boooo, I say!
FOX and CBS have rejected a commercial for Trojan condoms on the grounds that they believed the ads stressed pregnancy prevention over disease prevention. From the NYTimes coverage:
Fox and CBS both rejected the commercial. Both had accepted Trojan's previous campaign, which urged condom use because of the possibility that a partner might be H.I.V.-positive, perhaps unknowingly. A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, "Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention -- which may be allowed -- and…
purepedantry | May 17, 2007The NYTimes has an interesting article on the increasing amount people are willing to pay for donor eggs:
A survey published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility, "What Is Happening to the Price of Eggs?" found that the national average compensation for donors was $4,217. At least one center told the authors of the paper that it paid $15,000. Many centers did not respond.
Though laws prohibit the sale of transplant organs, sperm donors have always received small payments, and prospective parents in the United States are allowed to compensate women for their far greater…
purepedantry | April 24, 2007If you read the statistics, it isn't difficult to question the effectiveness of abstinence-only education in schools. It is about as effective as telling a three-year-old to not eat that big cookie on the table and then leaving the room to see what happens. However, I was under the distinct impression that there were still many people in denial of this fact -- hence my surprise when I read the following editorial in the Christian Science Monitor:
It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. The abstinence-only sex-education programs on which the federal government has been spending around $176…
purepedantry | April 18, 2007It is going to be a big day of other people's work because I don't have time to post anything of my own. However, that doesn't mean the day is news-free. The Supreme Court issued a decision today upholding the Federal Partial Abortion ban:
A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the first nationwide ban on a specific abortion procedure, restricting abortion rights in a ruling on one of the nation's most divisive and politically charged issues.
By a 5-4 vote, the high court rejected two challenges to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act that President George W. Bush signed…
purepedantry | December 20, 2006Americans are not waiting until marriage to have sex:
More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."
Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and…
purepedantry | November 9, 2006Here is an audio recording of the oral arguments in the case of Gonzales vs. Carhart (as an mp3).
Gonzales vs. Carhart is a case about the federal partial birth abortion ban:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments on the federal late-term abortion ban, the first major abortion issue before a more conservative court now that Samuel Alito has replaced retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
The procedure in question in the current cases, Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, is called by critics "partial birth" abortion and is medically known as "intact dilation…
purepedantry | November 6, 2006Eugene Volokh has written an article in the Harvard Law Review arguing that abortion is constitutional. This is not shocking. The Supreme Court has made clear that abortion is constitutional. However, he is arguing -- rather than from the point of view of right to privacy -- abortion to save a woman's life is constitution because of the right to self-defense:
Three women lie in adjoining hospital rooms. A fourth lives a block away. All are in deadly peril.
Alice is seven months pregnant, and the pregnancy threatens her life. Her fetus has long been viable, so she no longer has the Roe/…