Time Immortal

Count Roland writes in with a commentary on this CBC article, in which birth control advocates claim that “millions” need access to “family planning” and safe access to information about contraception…and that in the absence of this information, the result will be millions of deaths.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/07/14/f-birth-control.html

“Millions of mothers” die because there are no birth control pills? The quoted figure of “one per minute” only yeilds 525K [deaths per anum].

And contraception is not necesarily a part of ‘essential health services’ — how about we make sure there are the antibiotics and other drugs needed, qualified health professionals, and sanitation services rather than ’safe contraception’?

That would, O Reader, be smart. Indeed, much could be done in e.g. Africa if the average African male could be persuaded to remain faithful to a single sexual partner (this would also do wonders, as has been seen in the case of Uganda, to reduce the spread rate of e.g. HIV and AIDS — two birds, one stone!).

But then, it might be too generous to label most birth control activists as “smart”, wouldn’t it? They are, at least, too ignorant to realize that they are solving (or attempting to solve) the wrong problem, as the good Count points out; adequate health care and access to effective medication would do as much — if not much, much more — to reduce the mortality rate associated with pregnancy in the poorer countries on the world than access to birth control ever could hope to.

Personally, I find this little quoted tidbit of information to be particularly odious, as it is reflective of a reasoning that is becoming more and more common in the birth control industry and lobby:

Birth control can prevent 2.7 million newborn deaths each year.

This is classic Screwtape. Okay, yes, technically it is probably true that birth control could prevent over two million infants from dying each and every year. But hidden in this vague truth is a more terrible truth: the method of prevention has nothing to do with properly caring for those infants and seeing that they are given adequate nutrition, and in fact has everything to do with preventing the infants themselves from ever existing in the first place.

And therein is the lie.

The other day, my wife was looking to buy some particle board (long story, don’t ask). She bought one sheet at a cost of just over $5, but had to go back for a second sheet. The second sheet didn’t have a price tag, and eventually the clerk must have found a product SKU he could use…and the sheet rang in at $34.99. Thinking this couldn’t possibly be correct, my wife followed things up with the store’s manager, and he actually let her have it for $1. I joked that were this a Dilbertian office, she could claim on her achievement report that she had just saved the company $33.99.

Of course, that would hardly be truthful…but that’s exactly the sort of logic that is being employed in the above argument for birth control: let’s prevent over two million deaths by preventing over two million births!

On one hand, it is good that the pro-contraception lobby can be shown up as liars without much effort. On the other hand, far too many people are being swayed by what are obviously flimsy lies that crumble under even the slightest analysis (remember: one death per minute does not yield millions of deaths each year: in a typical year, it yields 525,600 deaths…and arguably, most of those deaths are not due to a lack of access to birth control either — they are probably due to lack of nutrition and lack of access to normal, effective pre-natal medical care).

Update: Welcome, UnAborted readers!

What an unsurprising thing is this!

How convenient it would have been for liberals if, as predicted by many in the 1980s, AIDS had spread like wildfire among Western heterosexuals. But it didn’t.

It would also have been very convenient if the introduction of condoms had significantly reduced infection in African countries, so the practice of self-indulgent sexual “grazing” could have escaped moral judgment.

But alas for all those non-judgmental AIDS do-gooders: What has worked best and most rapidly to reduce HIV infection among both homosexuals and promiscuous Africans is partner reduction.

…

Following sustained public information campaigns, [Helen Epstein] notes, gay sex with multiple sex partners declined by 60% between 1984 and 1988 in San Francisco. New cases of AIDS plummeted from a peak of 2,400 in 1984 to fewer than 600 in 2000.

And then there’s Uganda, where Epstein’s postdoctoral work at the Uganda Cancer Institute sparked her interest in HIV/AIDS. Even though condom use rose throughout the ’90s all over Africa, the HIV rate also kept climbing — everywhere but Uganda, which had actually begun the decade with the highest rates of new HIV infection. As Fumento noted in his column, the proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plummeted in the 1990s from 21% to 6%.

When the data was crunched by AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin (as noted in a review of Epstein’s book in the June 23 issue of The Weekly Standard), this startling decline was not found to correspond to the increase in the use of condoms, but rather to the decrease in the proportion of casual sex with numerous partners.

For as much as post-Christian sexual morality is touted as somehow superior to the prudish ways of the West’s Christian past, time and again it seems to be the case that applying some good, old fashioned Christian sensibility to one’s sex life is still the best insurance against contracting all manner of STDs. Few people indeed have gotten sick and died from having remained faithful to one sexual partner for the duration of their adult life, especially when that partner has remained faithful to them as well.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Four years ago, when the RCMP raided ’s house to seize privileged evidence that had been leaked to her, the media went on the warpath for weeks, reporting on the subject and toasting O’Neill as a free speech hero. So said the group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

I agree that an actual raid on O’Neill’s house to seize documents is indeed a big news story, and it does touch upon issues of the free press. But is not a two-year-long government investigation of the political thoughts of a Canadian publisher newsworthy as well?

The small sliver of opinion on the blogosphere that has spoken out against me on this matter has focused, in the main, on my own personality or political stripe — I can count on two fingers the blog posts that actually support human rights commissions. The bulk of the opposition to me is personal. Is that the same thing in the mainstream media — for personal or political reasons, or competitive reasons, they’re declining to cover a story of government censorship? My interrogation is not as dramatic as a raid on O’Neill’s home for documents, but it is just as troubling. More, even — O’Neill’s “crime” was receiving leaked documents. My crime was having illegal thoughts about poltiical and religious subjects.

Perhaps another reason is that the bulk of the media is rather shy about this entire subject, given that the vast majority of them hid under their desks during the initial cartoon kerfuffle. The Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression sure did. When we were taken to the human rights commission, they thought it more important to issue a press release about freedom in Uganda. At least they were better than Amnesty International, which condemned the publication of the cartoons. Like “free speech” advocates who went on vacation, editors and producers who were AWOL — or worse, enforced the cartoon ban in their own media organizations — might not want to remind themselves or their audience of that now.

Another reason might be ongoing fear of human rights complaints against them — the “chill” factor. Best to avoid difficult issues, and focus on happy human interest stories everyone can agree on, including radical Muslim imams.

But the story isn’t about me. It isn’t even about the cartoons or about Islam. It’s about whether or not the government can summon anyone, including a publisher, to an interrogation to answer for their political thoughts.

If I’m fair game today, anyone is fair game tomorrow.

Ezra Levant asks (rightly) just why it is that the story of his struggle with the Alberta Human Rights Commission has not received wider attention in the Canadian media. In the blogosphere and in the American media, the Levant-HRC fracas has been well-documented and has received the attention it deserves — suppression of freedom of expression should be viewed as a serious threat to human liberties in the West, after all.

But in Canada, hardly anyone in the media has said anything about Levant’s case, and Mark Steyn’s case has received only slightly more attention. It is as if the issue of the existence of an organ of the Canadian government which exists solely to trample on the legitimate right of all Canadians to freedom of expression rates a “no, nevermind” from most major media outlets in this nation…which, one would hope, should be the first people to decry even the slightest encroachment on that right.

But I guess the idea of actually standing in opposition to the activist left over an issue such as this just doesn’t fit the narrative.