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To: Ronaldus Magnus
Objective standards or not, you err in attempting to use a cross-cultural argument to disprove a time-based effect assertion.

How can we evaluate the statement without a control group who don't embrace contraceptives?

The statement that "contraception is immoral and has lead directly to the devaluing of life" needs to be examined in a before and after framework to test its veracity.

Right. Which is what I attempted to do. I also you contemporaneous examples but we can go back as far in history as you want and find the same "valuation" dissonance. However, there are impracticalities in comparing modern Western standards of "valueing human life" to previous time periods. Which is why I asked the author of the comment to outline what he means by the word "value" so that we know what we are comparing with what.

Your litany of tourist horror stories does nothing to undermine the original assertion since we have no idea what they were like before a contraception mentality was introduced (or what effect such an introduction would have).

These are not "tourist horror stories". I lived and worked in many of these places. These are real human lives and real human suffering. Are you perhaps devalueing humans of other cultures than our own?

The fact is that contraception is not part of their culture and yet .... individual lives are NOT valued in the same way they are in our culture which does embrace contraceptives. What are we to do with this dissonance between the premis presented and the facts?
78 posted on 05/22/2002 8:43:57 PM PDT by Lorianne
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To: Lorianne
How can we evaluate the statement without a control group who don't embrace contraceptives?

In testing a time based assertion, the control group needs to be similar to the test group except for the introduced change. In this case we would want to look at groups that were similar except for the advent of wide spread acceptance of contraception. Your list of cultural ills in post #66 all relate to cultures that were markedly different from the West even before contraceptive use was accepted here. In addition, there have been other major unrelated cultural introductions during this period. Until you compensate for these differences, any causation based on the comparison is meritless.

The fact is that contraception is not part of their culture and yet .... individual lives are NOT valued in the same way they are in our culture which does embrace contraceptives. What are we to do with this dissonance between the premise presented and the facts?

This is why cross cultural comparisons are seldom used in attempting to explain this kind of effect causation. Mechanical explanations, such as in the original article, are more effectively examined by using time-series studies within a single test culture. Personal empirical evidence should not be brought into a discussion unless the bearer can properly defend it in a constructive way. I suggest you look for previously published studies if you would like to add meaningful facts to a discussion like this.

95 posted on 05/23/2002 7:44:23 AM PDT by Ronaldus Magnus
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