« Maybe Wishing on a Star Would Work Better | Main | Matthew 25 : 40 »

March 30, 2006

Reason versus Religion

It's always amusing (and saddening) to watch people of a religious bent engage in breathless condemnation of something with which they disagree, when all evidence indicates that they - well - are pretty damn clueless.

To wit, RightwingSparkle on the latest RU-486 deaths:

10 years ago Charmain Yoest of Reasoned Audacity wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal asking how many women needed to be guinea pigs for RU486? I guess seven dead aren't enough.

...which leads us to see what Ms. Yoest has to say on the subject:

Seriously: How many more women??!! A total of SEVEN women have died from using this drug here in the United States. Seven.

And how is the FDA responding? They are planning to hold a workshop. In May.

Now, pushing the nonsense out of our minds, wishing it back behind the church doors for a moment, let us see what the voice of reason would say:

Dr. Michael Greene, professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, estimates that the risk of death from infectious complications of RU-486 is about 1 in every 100,000 uses.

Compare this to pregnancy in the United States, which at least in the mid-80s, had a maternal mortality rate of 14 for every 100,000 pregnancies. A 1994 study in Utah put it at just over 12 deaths per 100,000 pregancies.

By this reckoning, I'd be more stupid to let my wife get pregnant than to let her use the pill.

That voice of reason is yours truly, in RWS' comments, demonstrating that her outrage is nothing but self-righteous moralizing in the pursuit of her religious agenda. Either that or a complete lack of mathematical ability. But, hey, the uber-religious ignore science when it contradicts the Good Book, so why should math be any different?

Besides, math is, like, hard and stuff.

Update: You really ought to click on over to RWS and read the comments. It's like a textbook on logical fallacy.

Update 2: RWS has responded to this post (as my comments are down for the time being). I'm afraid she hasn't really helped her case, as I demonstrate in the comments.

Update 3: Flashback.