20 April 2001
I want to do a quick estimation. You see, my friend Brenda wrote a paper
on population control as part of foreign aid -- you see, many foreign
humanitarian aid packages have population control as part of them. Of
course, this is in aid, generally, to southeast Asia and subsaharan
Africa. I have yet to hear of any Kosovans getting birth control
propaganda with their food and health supplies, but let's not inject =my=
opinion into this. In any case, Brenda makes the case that from a purely
rational basis, population control as part of foreign aid packages is, at
best, misguided. There is an assumption of a desire for everyone's basic
needs to be met, so that may be seen as a moral stance, but if one posits
that as the basis for justice in the world... well, I don't want to get
into it right now. I put a little entry up on livejournal pointing here,
and in the comments Brenda points to her paper, and you can read all about
it there (shame on you for using Word, Bren! Adding my lashes to everyone
else's....)
Still, I wanted to determine a good estimate of how many pregnancies a
woman should expect to have, under various conditions. The result shall
be a table. Let's look at 3 different reproductive lifetimes - 10, 20, or
30 years of intercourse and fertility. Let's assume (not the best of
assumptions, but it will reduce the amount of stuff I need to estimate)
that a woman can get pregnant once a year, and that getting pregnant this
year has nothing to do with getting pregnant the previous year.
So far, so good. Now, let's look at expected pregnancy rate. The FDA has
been so good as to compile statistics on pregnancy rates under different
forms of contraception (interestingly, vasectomies prevent pregnancy
better than various forms of female sterilization.... I think the Chinese
government should think about that.) The rates are given in percentage
getting pregnant within one year (perfect, just the probability I
need). This is basically a binomial random variable - if one has N years
of course and fertility, and in any given year one has the probability p
of getting pregnant, then the expected number of pregnancies is Np.
Oh I got the stats from:
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1997/conceptbl.html
Let's look at a couple cases:
to one decimal point, the expected number of pregnancies:
10 20 30
male sterilization .01 .02 .03
combined pill, typical use .5 1.0 1.5
combined pill, best use .01 .02 .03
Norplant .01 .02 .03
Condom (male), typical use 1.4 2.8 4.2
Condom (male), best use .3 .6 .9
Withdrawal 1.9 3.8 5.7
No method 8.5 17 26
(I don't trust their description of Natural Family Planning, because I bet
the calendar method is included, which works for almost no woman.)
Ok, that last set of numbers seem high, but very few people use =no=
method whatsoever, and I think people in general underestimate the
likelihood of miscarriage. Also, women and men have varying levels of
fertility; I also bet that people with 9 children might not get much of a
chance to have intercourse. So I will keep that all in mind.
Those, of course, are only expected values. Let's look now at the
probability that one will have =no= children, in 10, 20, and 30 years of
intercourse and fertility: (formula is (1-p)^n )
10 20 30
male sterilization 99% 98% 97%
combined pill, typical use 60% 36% 21%
combined pill, best use 99% 98% 97%
Norplant 99% 98% 97%
Condom (male), typical use 22% 5% 1%
Condom (male), best use 74% 54% 40%
Withdrawal 12% 1% 0.2%
No method *
Why that *? Because for those using no birth control methods, the
probability of having no children in 10 years is about
10^(-7) percent. Wonder if you're infertile? Have intercourse for 10
years. If there are no pregnancies by that time, I would say it's pretty
certain that =one= of the people in the couple is infertile.
Now you can see why Sarai and Abram were so bummed.
Still, look at those numbers and think about it. Are you part of a
straight couple having sexual intercourse regularly? What birth control
do you use? (btw, I didn't put up methods like diaphragms, vaginal
sponges, and cervical caps, because they are about as good as using
withdrawal as birth control.) What kind of odds do you think there are
for someone getting pregnant ever? One's odds may be good for any given
year, but if you think about it over the long haul - well, if the guy
isn't sterilized or the woman isn't using Norplant, chances are better
than half that the woman will get pregnant at least once. (and please,
don't get cutesy and try to claim that the couple get pregnant. I
promise, Stu, I will punch you if ever you say "=we're= pregnant!" You
can hold me to that promise.) (in addition, though I do go on about
vasectomies in the following, it =is= only women who get
pregnant. HOWEVER, as Stu likes to remind me, child support policies tend
to favor mothers over fathers, and what with DNA technology nowadays,
don't even THINK about getting out of getting caught. Anyway, men, if
you want to avoid such messy situations, vasectomies are the way to
go. All that is affected in such a operation is the vas deferens,
highway to the sperm. Your testes will still spurt out all of those
hormones you love so well.)
Anyway, it gives one food for thought. Vasectomies, it seems, really are
effective (yes, female sterilization is actually just as effective -
they're the same in order of magnitude.) Norplant is also very
effective. However, the most popular forms of birth control, condoms and
pills, can be very lacking.
So, to VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement): I hope you promote
voluntary sterilization or Norplant. Because the Pill, as people usually
use it, will actually bring about a birth rate below sustenance, but those
are more people who may decide that they want to multiply the world's
numbers, not decrease it. Condoms? Condoms are awful in preventing
pregnancies, as people are actually using them.
I am against VHEMT's goals, but they don't really address why. I want to
argue with one of their lines, though:
"Some of us should reproduce because we're better than others."
People got the wrong idea out of the eugenics movement. One of the ways
people =prove= evolutionarily that they are superior to other individuals
is that they reproduce - and reproduce in such a way that their own
children reproduce, and so on. The fact that someone has a child, which
then goes on to have its own children, proves that the original someone
was biologically fit. Biology doesn't care that one is George Washington
- one can be a great person in many dimensions, but evolution doesn't
care. (George had no children. Martha had two daughters by a previous
marriage - so she had been fertile at =some= point.) Evolution will not
force other fertile people to have sex with you if you happen to found a
nation. I wear glasses, my parents and their parents had vision problems.
That didn't stop them from reproducing. My dad died at age 38, but not
before siring three daughters. He's still in the evolutionary game, even
though he carried genes that make one prone to early heart disease.
Eugenics, as people have practiced them, are a conscious attempt to do an
end run around nature's own judgements of fitness. I find it interesting
that many of the "elite" end up having no children or only one child.
I intend to try to reproduce, and reproduce as often as my body and mind
can handle (well, and as much as Stu can handle as well). But I would not
be the least surprised if it turns out that that scourge of the media,
teenage mothers, are the most biologically successful of all.