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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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To: Ronaldus Magnus
Doesn't "culture" change over time too? How to separate the cultural changes so that you can isolate acceptance of contraception as causation for something as subjective as "devalueing human life" (presumably more now than before)? After all, valueing human life is conditional on many factors. It wasn't too long previous to the introduction of contraceptives that slavery was acceptable for example.

Yet another reason we need a concise definition of what is meant by the phrase "devalueing human life" so that we can compare apples to apples.
101 posted on 05/23/2002 10:52:32 AM PDT by Lorianne
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