Pregnancy: An STD?Posted by Rick on August 22nd, 2007
I was reading this article about the morning after pill, and I found two phrases really interesting: 1) the “risk of pregnancy” 2) “emergency contraception.”
The last line says it all,
“Pregnancy is not a disease,” McQuade said. “There is no absolute duty to dispense a non-therapeutic drug, but there is a basic civil right of conscience.”
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August 22nd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
August 24th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
The phrase “the risk of pregnancy” is ubiquitous in the social scientific literature on pregnancy and sexual behavior. Risk simply refers to an outcome which is uncertain ex ante, but which has some known probability distribution. Sex between a fertile man and woman has such a distribution, and therefore sex can be considered “risky” in that sense. Not in that it causes an STD. Risk does not mean that the outcome is bad either. There is risk in flipping a coin. In heaven there will be risk. Anytime there are choices to be made, and the outcomes are random, we say the decision has risk.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Well, that’s why I find those choice of words peculiar. Pregnancy isn’t a “risk” just like avoiding pregnancy isn’t an “emergency.” There are plenty of words the author could have used that would have more “neutral” connotations. The article is written for broader culture, not those that tend to read “social scientific literature.”
If you take a look at the history of linguistics, it seems that often benign terms end up being really important fifty years later when they take on new meanings. That’s what I find interesting because, over time, the words will be interpreted popularly, so that it really will be an “emergency” to have to use contraception or an increase in the chance or pregnancy really is a “risk.”
Context is everything, and I can’t imagine that this author is that ignorant of audience.
August 25th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Last time we announced to my MIL that we were pregnant, she said “Aren’t you taking precautions?” To which my witty husband replied, “Yeah, I got married.”
Its just the way the entire culture regards pregnancy and childbirth, as though even conjugal relations are “risky” because they could always end in pregnancy. Sick.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
You might be right. I have not read linguistics. I’m an economist who studies sex, and I use this language everyday, as does everyone else I know who works in sex, the familiy and the like. It is very common to speak of sex, and pregnancy, in probabilistic terms – which is why it is therefore natural to speak of sex as risk. And I think, too, it is not too far off of how many people to think about it. Just ask the countless families currently trying to get pregnant. Pregnancy is an outcome that is hardly guaranteed. Sex between a fertile man and woman can result in a fertilized egg, or not, and that outcome is more or less randomly determined by some underlying probability distribution. To say sex is “risky” is to provide a scientific perspective to bear, but it’s a perspective that appears to have become far more common as evidenced by the author’s willingness to use this language.
August 28th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
“I’m an economist who studies sex”
How many people get to say that?
August 28th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Depends. Fertility’s been studied since Malthus. Elective abortion, oral contraception, and things relating to the woman’s ability to time her pregnancies has been studied more seriously for 20 years or so. I study mainly STDs, but even that is becoming fairly commonplace in economics. Posner has a very good book (not surprisingly) on sex and economics entitled SEX AND REASON from the early to mid 1990s.