Monday, December 06, 2010

A bright side to AIDS

According to this study of U.S. states, the perceived threat of HIV lowered the rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.  The PC strategy of scaring the hell out of heterosexuals turned out to be a good thing. 
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2 comments:

  1. Hail11:33 PM

    These two graphs from that paper sum up their argument:
    1.) Abortion rate, 1970s-2000s
    2.) Reported cumulative HIV cases plotted against abortion rate

    This seems convincing. But violent crime also declined concurrently with the abortion rate. Didn't it? The murder rate peaked in, what, 1991?

    I don't think you can attribute the decline of crime to the AIDS scare, can you? This would suggests that there is something else at play with the abortion decline too, at least partly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hail2:02 PM

    I looked into this a little more and found the graphs I posted above to be wrong. (They are screenshots from the study). Whoever put that graph together really screwed up the abortion trends.

    I have posted about this and proposed another, less quantifiable, theory on why abortion declined.

    ReplyDelete

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