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spoiler The number of people savage menThe number of people gentle women
6 comments
Where, exactly, do you come up with the numbers?
By killed through warfare, are you including civilian casualties? Are you including disease that spreads during wars? Famines following a war? I think you just pulled that number out of your ass.
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and came up with the figure of an average 103,000 abortions per day. Which sounds really high, but since we’re talking worldwide and I’m aware of scale perception issues, I did some checking with WHO statistics and surprisingly, the figure of 1.5 billion abortions between 1982 and 2022 appears to be pretty close to correct. There are actually roughly 200,000 abortions per day worldwide at present, and in the past, the population was lower and abortion wasn’t as widely available in some places. So apparently this part at least is correct; I’m not interested in checking on the war statistic.
Though it’s also something to note that if there were no abortions, that doesn’t mean that the population today would necessarily be any higher, and if it were it would definitely not be 1.5 billion higher. Infanticide, severe neglect, and famines are still things. Risky pregnancies, if not aborted, can result in the death of the pregnant person and prospective child, and the non-existence of any future children they might have had. People who get pregnant under bad circumstances might end up having fewer kids than they otherwise would; people who get pregnant under good circumstances but earlier than they planned might have the same number of kids, just different ones. Or they might indeed have an extra one (or however many), especially if they never planned to have any kids in the first place; it’s hard to say how much overall effect it would have one way or another.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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