Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Snapper Yard Cruiser Manual

unwanted pregnancies in the world. A bit 'of numbers.



Bill Ryerson of the Population Media Center shared with us a paper published last December in the journal Studies in Family Planning . The article is titled Unintended Pregnancy: Worldwide Levels, Trends, and Outcomes Susheela Singh, Gilda Sedge, and Rubina Hussain (unwanted pregnancy in the world: levels, trends and outcomes).

At our conference we talked about this issue thanks to the contribution of Marco Cappato and Carmen Sorrentino (cf. Overshoot No.1). The data reported in their intervention and in the data section of No. 1 of our report had originated as the World Bank (WB), but I always had the problem of the methodology for estimating such data. The work presented here confirms the extent of the problem, unwanted pregnancies were estimated by the World Bank in 75 million in 2006 and are estimated at 83 million in 2008 from the article of which I speak, and also explains how these numbers are estimated through surveys targeted by Population Division of the UN worldwide. I will not bore you with the method, but I like to have confirmation that there is one :-). And above all let you know!

The results are perhaps what matters most.

Year 2008 (in million pregnancies)
Total pregnancies: 208
in developing countries: 185
Asia: 119
Africa: 49
Latin America: 17
Europe 13
North America 7
unwanted pregnancy: 86
of these unwanted pregnancies the outcome was as follows: Births
unplanned: 33
Abortions: 41
miscarriages: 11.

(NB The discrepancies in the amounts depend on the rounding.)

unwanted pregnancies are therefore 41% of the total, but what is striking and most surprising is that the percentage of unwanted pregnancies is higher in developed countries 47% those in developing countries 40%. These figures are cause for reflection for all, I think.

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