Contraception is not improvement in health. Around 1800's women used to have atleast 10 children. Women now cannot even imagine having 10 children. Most of them will die before giving birth to 10th one.
Women in the past would very frequently die in childbirth. Do you have data to show that childbirth is as dangerous as it was in the path? Or that it was safer in the past? (That would be truly shocking and counterintuitive.)
Year Deaths per 1000 live births
------------ ----------------------------
1700 to 1750 10.5 (British [1])
1750 to 1800 7.5 (British [1])
1800 to 1850 5.0 (British [1])
1990 3.8 (Global [2])
2013 2.0 (Global [2])
2013 <0.09 (UK [3])
2013 <0.28 (US [4])
From that same Slate article, child birth is still one of the most dangerous things for young women, despite it being far safer than ever in the past. This means that contraception is actually a health benefit. It makes it much safer to be a young woman.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT
[3] http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality....
[5] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of years ago.
Either way, contraception is pretty orthogonal to the actual mortality rate of women due to child birth.
Child birth is hugely dangerous for humans, and the speculation in the scientific field is that it's an evolutionary interplay between the size of an infant's skull at birth, constraints on hip sizes, and the amount of brain development that can happen as a fetus or as an infant.
Tens of thousands of years is pretty short in terms of morphological development of humans. Evolution on time scales shorter than that is limited to extremely simple mutations, usually, such as lactose tolerance by adults (which has arisen multiple times independently in the past 10k years).
I do agree that contraception has little impact on maternal mortality during child birth.
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe in the following is wrong.
1. It happened because of living conditions. 2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade. 3. age-old war against infectious disease 4. discovery of the germ theory of disease 5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.
If you are saying "child mortality is going down only because women are having fewer children and not because of improvements in healthcare," then that statement is obviously wrong and would appear to be satire in itself. If its satire, I'm not sure what the point is. If it's not satire, then I'm not sure how you're going to convince people without at least a fig leaf of a citation.
"child mortality is going down only because women are having fewer children and not because of improvements in healthcare"
There might be improvements in healthcare, antibiotics and vaccinations. But I believe that contraception is a major factor in improving child mortality rate. Obviously I cannot cite anything, as it's my belief.
So I started looking for examples to see if I am correct. Looks like my belief is wrong.
Despite a higher prevalence of several risk factors for perinatal and infant death among the Amish, neonatal and infant death rates for Geauga Settlement Amish have been very similar to the corresponding rates for white children in rural Ohio and the state as a whole.
--Perinatal, Infant, and Child Death Rates among the Old Order Amish
Why? What benefit does that provide to anyone?
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe that:
1. It happened because of living conditions. 2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade. 3. age-old war against infectious disease 4. discovery of the germ theory of disease 5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.
I believe that we are being mislead about improvements in health, while in reality people have become weaker, less healthier. There are more diseases now than before. We couldn't really find cure for diseases. Discovery of Antibiotics was helpful for a while. Now bacteria is winning that battle with some superbugs among us.
It's also easier to have ten children when you start having them at 15 or sixteen, like my grandmother did, rather than at 30, as many are doing now.
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe in the following is wrong.
1. It happened because of living conditions. 2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade. 3. age-old war against infectious disease 4. discovery of the germ theory of disease 5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.