Fun with statistics: contraception & religion edition

[bodlon]

So I really do owe you all some updates on the writing front, but I've been feeling unusually contemplative of late. Meanwhile, the whole religious organization vs. contraception coverage thing has been very noisy for the past couple of weeks. People -- many of them clergy or would-be GOP presidential candidates -- have been saying enormously dumb things.

How dumb? Let's consult the statistics, shall we?

According to the Guttmacher Institute, there are about 62 million women in the US aged 15-44, or "of childbearing age." Of those women, over 99% of those who have had sex have used some form of contraception. Of that overall 62 million, only about 43 million are fertile, sexually active, and do not want children. Of those, about 89% are actively using contraception.

89% of 43 million is a little bit over 38 million women.

Now, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 78.4% of people identify as Christian, with about 51% being Protestant in the United States. Now, I could find a breakdown by gender/age, but for simplicity's sake, let's go ahead and work with that 78.4% number. That gives us about 48.6 million women in the US identifying as Christian, and a little bit more than 31 and a half million identifying as Protestant.

So let's draw this out, entertaining the notion that Christians go on one side, active contraception users on the other:

Even assuming these two positions are absolutely antithetical to one another, there are at minimum 24.6 million Christian women -- a small majority -- actively using contraception. Note again that this is active use, and does not include women who have used contraception, or intend to use it again after a current effort to have a child. In fact, contraception is actually a near-universal norm among religious women of all Christian denominations, including Catholicism. Eschewing it is exceptional.

Not in the "hey, great job!" sense. Exceptional in the, "wow, that is really unusual" sense.

So what does this mean? It means that the political rhetoric of contraception v. religion is both deceptive in terms of how individuals conduct themselves and wildly out of step with the lives and needs of women here in the US. The "religious liberty" argument? Total red herring.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com