On an Abortion-Adjusted Life Expectancy

Once life expectancy numbers are adjusted for abortion deaths like they should be, we see an America much different than the one progressives love to paint.

One of the biggest problems contemporary man faces is his faith in science that often rises to the level of worship. Often this newfound faith in science grows at the expense of religious practice and belief, which comes to be seen as mythical depictions of scientific truth dressed up in a way that the unlearned can grasp. Thus ASJ delights in any chance we get to expose the flaws in worldly wisdom, and explain reasonably how man would do better to put more faith in “superstitious” religious leaders and less trust in scientists who are increasingly becoming blind guides leading the blind.

We sit in an age where scientific advances continually invade the realm of religious morals. Artificial contraception gets more and more creative thereby straining our sexual morality. Both the beginning and end of life, two realms where faith must supplement the clear limits of reason, attract a variety of medical procedures with their own moral questions. And now plastic surgery procedures are able to take quite ordinary men and women and transform them into the magazine cover model of their choice. Sex, life, death, the body—all important themes in the Christian religion—are increasingly receiving from science teachings that are quite opposed to those that Jesus gave the Church. This puts us believers in a difficult state. For like Eve thought of the fruit, these scientific technologies can often seem good, even if there is something else inside of us that finds them repugnant. It helps then to be able to logically demonstrate the moral voids in the scientific worldview, the rotten wormholes in the tempting fruit.

These progressives of whom we speak advance the notion that all this has allowed man to improve his state now that the shackles of Old Religion have been shucked for the tenets of modernism. And sad but true there is no shortage of voices within the bosom of the Church who sympathize with this mindset. But we argue vehemently that contemporary man is not advancing in any real sense, but in fact is regressing at an alarming pace. This is evident, we claim, once true measures of progress are identified that rest on sound reason. In this month that the Church sets aside to fight for respect for life, we critique the prevalent error that modern medicine is giving man a longer and healthier lifespan, and we argue that this is only true if one neglects deaths due to abortion. For we only arrive at an honest assessment of medical technologies when we include the full gamut of its dominion.

Scientists love to use the life expectancy statistic as proof that man’s faith in himself is working wonders. They love to show how modern medicine has given us a life expectancy of over 77 years, and promises more if only we give it a larger role and put less trust in the Church. This irks ASJ, because Scripture reveals more about how to cure the body than Catholics like to admit these days. So we relish the chance to show that scientists lie with statistics, and that modern man is moving backwards at an alarming pace. For when life expectancy is computed by modern “scientists,” abortions are not figured into the equation. It is this glaring oversight that we aim to correct.

Now there is actually disagreement over the proper way to calculate life expectancy. But for the present, we gloss over the technical details and broadly describe two common approaches.

The simplest way to calculate life expectancy is to average the age of every person who dies in a given year. This produces what one might call the average lifespan. In theory, as medicine advances people should die at an older age, and the life expectancy should get bigger.

While this is a very intuitive way of measuring medical progress, critics point out a flaw in that it tells more about people in the past than about people in the present. For example, many of those dying today lived in a time and culture that accepted smoking. But children today are warned aggressively about the dangers of smoking, and therefore trending data can estimate that in the near future there will be fewer smoking-related deaths and thus longer life spans. So this more prevalent method of computing life expectancy uses a more complicated procedure that tries to estimate how long a person born today can expect to live.

This method however has its flaws as well. First of all, it is forced to predict the future, which, try as it might, science can never achieve. As a result, it comes to an answer based on a lot of assumptions, whereas the first method produces a number based on observable fact.

But the biggest flaw in this method— and one that Catholics can easily spot—is that by definition it excludes infants that die before birth. For it asks the question “How long can a child being born today expect to live?” instead of the real question which is “How long can a child being conceived today expect to live?”

But we now show that when the horror of abortion is properly accounted for in the life expectancy statistics, it is clear that modern medicine is not making us better, it is making us worse!

We attempt here to estimate the life expectancy the way it should be done—by including abortion deaths. We obviously need a lot of assumptions to do this, but according to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were about 2.4 million deaths in the United States in the year 2000 Let us assume that the average age at death for these 2.4 million people is well approximated by the life expectancy for that year, which was 76.9.

When abortion deaths are included in the life expectancy statistics, we see the real truth that our “great country” has made all the progress of a sub-Saharan nation.

Now to get the full breadth of the American culture of death, we must also account for the approximately 1.4 million babies aborted in that same year. Let’s be conservative in our estimate, and assume that all of these murder victims were near full-term. This assumption lets us estimate their age to be zero instead of having to introduce negative ages. Now, adding in deaths from abortion, there were actually 3.8 million people who died in 2000. The 2.4 million who died outside the womb accounted for 63.2% of the total deaths. The aborted babies accounted for the remaining 37.8% of all deaths in the U.S. that year, whether the government and medicine want to recognize it or not. So with this math, a simple weighted average yields an abortion-adjusted life expectancy of

(76.9)(0.632) + (0)(0.378) = 48.6 years!

The true life expectancy of the United States ranks us just above Chad, Rwanda, and Nigeria! So much for progress! Certainly the best we can do at this point is estimate our target value. There are so many unknowns in the data, and some we could never capture. Clearly our analysis omits the complications introduced by miscarriages, which we assume constant across all societies. Also, for dramatic effect, we assume abortions in third-world countries are negligible. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations could not pass rigorous academic muster, and are not intended to at this point. But it is certainly worth reflecting upon that modern medicine can only look good by ignoring the mass-murder that it inflicts upon man in the form of abortion, procured at the hands of abortionists, trained in the same modern medical methods that “make us all better.”

We can clearly see the plain truth that any society, however rich and powerful, declines quickly and measurably if it chooses not to follow the moral laws God gave it. Once scientists stop lying to us about statistics, we see that man’s sense of increased control over his destiny is merely an illusion. Man’s increase in medical “knowledge,” like the fruit in Eden, has introduced both good and evil, and both be summed to arrive at a true measure of man’s success.

 This article appeared in the October 25, 2006 issue of The Loyal Lion.