Poll of the Day > I'm getting my tubes removed

(+) Yeah! (+)

ReturnOfFa posted...

Should those numbers effect people's perspective on the potential for reproductive rights to be diminished in various red states? When stats are relatively low in the first place (not diminishing the seriousness of any women dying from improper medical care), they aren't going to always follow a direct line year-by-year. I'm assuming that you'd still be for protections being put in place to prevent women dying during miscarriage, which have been removed in some states.

Absolutely.

adjl posted...

Yeah, I wouldn't even consider calling that comprehensive data. Aside from being anecdotal and not statistical data, it seems to mostly just be collecting stories that end up making the news in some capacity, which is going to miss every story that doesn't end up in the news. That is, as I said, a very incomplete data set.

It's the same methodology the Washington Post uses to track the number of people shot by police, specifically because official statistics don't catch every example. While it is almost certainly an undercount, it's not the two orders of magnitude undercount you're claiming. Given your claimed figure we'd be expecting 300+ cases a year, not the 6 (confirmed) cases in 2.5 years we've actually seen. Even allowing for the fact that only some states are included in that figure, and generally the less populated ones at that, it leads to the conclusion that there are significant overestimations in that statistical analysis.

willythemailboy posted...

It's the same methodology the Washington Post uses to track the number of people shot by police, specifically because official statistics don't catch every example.

The key difference being that "police shot person" is a pretty clear, objective criterion. "Person died after being denied health care because of abortion laws" is significantly more of a grey area, since the reasons for delaying/denying care often aren't publicized unless somebody puts effort into publicizing them (somebody who will be painting a target on their back by doing so if they live in a particularly anti-abortion community, as an added incentive against putting in that effort). Even finding the handful of news releases that do publicize that data is hard, given how vague the search terms have to be, so it's a given that this approach is going to significantly underreport cases.

willythemailboy posted...

Given your claimed figure we'd be expecting 300+ cases a year, not the 6 (confirmed) cases in 2.5 years we've actually seen.

Bear in mind that the analysis you've shared is looking specifically at "woman had complication during pregnancy and was denied care for the issue because of anti-abortion laws, which killed her." It does not capture "woman died from complications of a pregnancy she would not have attempted to carry to term if she had the option not to," which I would expect to make up the majority of the deaths that can be pinned on these laws. That, I expect, is what's going to make up most of that 24% projection.

Remember that, whatever specific numbers you can and cannot find to describe the last couple years, the mortality rate among American women who carry a pregnancy to term is 22.3/100k (which is incidentally the worst in the developed world by a considerable margin, and it's also more than double that for black women). The mortality rate for abortions in the US is 0.45/100k. It is significantly more dangerous to carry a pregnancy to term than to get an abortion, no matter what conclusions to the contrary you might draw from a handful of anecdotes. As such, denying access to abortions *will* result in more women who become pregnant dying, even before considering what that denial will do to health care around miscarriages and other pregnancy complications (many of which happen to women who do want to keep their babies).

adjl posted...

It does not capture "woman died from complications of a pregnancy she would not have attempted to carry to term if she had the option not to,"

It pretty explicitly did, particularly the ectopic pregnancy that had no chance of being carried to term.

adjl posted...

It is significantly more dangerous to carry a pregnancy to term than to get an abortion

I never said otherwise, only that the known cases of death due to abortion bans are still in the single digits whereas the statistical analysis you're quoting points to roughly a thousand. Normally when a statistical model differs from reality by two orders of magnitude people are honest enough to reevaluate that analysis.

willythemailboy posted...

It pretty explicitly did, particularly the ectopic pregnancy that had no chance of being carried to term.

That's still "this is a complication that didn't get addressed," not "she didn't want to be pregnant in the first place." I'm not talking about something going wrong with the pregnancy that meant abortion was the only safe option, I'm talking about pregnancies that would have been aborted as soon as they were identified regardless of whether or not complications would have arisen later. Most maternal deaths are not due to miscarriages gone wrong. They're due to bleeding (mostly postnatal), infections (mostly postnatal), eclampsia (after 20 weeks, usually after 28), and issues during delivery (axiomatically perinatal), all of which come long after the vast majority of miscarrying complications happen and even longer after abortion would be on the table as a treatment (after 20 weeks, you can just straight up deliver the baby and hope for the best if remaining pregnant is dangerous).

"This woman had a complication during her pregnancy that killed her because doctors weren't allowed to do an abortion" is obviously bad, but it's not the whole picture of the risks women face by carrying a pregnancy to term. By extension, it's not the whole picture of the risks women seek to avoid by having an abortion. By further extension, it's not the whole picture of deaths due to abortion bans.

willythemailboy posted...

I never said otherwise, only that the known cases of death due to abortion bans are still in the single digits whereas the statistical analysis you're quoting points to roughly a thousand. Normally when a statistical model differs from reality by two orders of magnitude people are honest enough to reevaluate that analysis.

My guy, look at what you're saying:

• Carrying a pregnancy to term is 40-50 times more dangerous than having an abortion
• Laws forcing pregnancies to be carried to term have resulted in fewer deaths than abortions have

These are mutually exclusive conclusions. This discrepancy can be explained in one of two ways:

• The historical data that yielded the former conclusion (and, consequently, any statistical projections based on this data) is somehow incorrect or has otherwise stopped representing the modern situation
• The anecdotal data that has yielded the latter conclusion paints a very incomplete picture of the mortality associated with abortion bans and should therefore not be cited as anything other than an example

Which of those seems more likely? Normally when an observation differs from a model that's backed up by decades of statistics, people are honest enough to reevaluate that observation.

December 20th hell yeah

Jen0125 posted...

I'm not even debating whether or not sex is only for procreation lmao. It's not and we're far past that conversation.

Good on ya. It's a tired conversation that needs to go, along with the older generations of folks clinging to such ignorant or destructive views.