Thursday, June 19, 2008
Abortions and Ageing
Rob briefly touches on abortion here. This comes at the same time as shocking figures about how many under 14s are having abortions. There's also a very interesting piece about ageing on Colin Farrelly's blog. If I understand him rightly, all those under 14s reproducing early are diminishing the effects of natural selection and thereby preventing humans living longer...
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I don't find it shocking. 163 under-14s had an abortion in a country of 60 million plus: I don't have the age cohort figures to hand, and am too lazy to find them, but there's got to be several hundred thousand under-14s who are capable of getting pregnant. That only less than 1 in a thousand did is not so terrible. Given the tiny proportion of a huge number involved, I'd guess that what looks like a substantial increase is well within the normal variation. On top of that, I'd much rather than 163 under-14s had an abortion than 163 under-14s had a child.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean I'm surprised in what you might call a predictive sense, more that a normative expectation is defeated. Given that under 16s shouldn't be having sex, you'd hope under 14s wouldn't need abortions. Just think again how young the undergrads are and then try to imagine 14 year olds. They're children FFS...
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