The upcoming vote concerning health care caused me to think about the leading cause of death in our country and the affect of this bill on that cause. The most recent hard numbers I could find quickly were from a 2009 report for the year of 2006. Not surprisingly, heart disease was at the top of the list for the general population. The report also included infant mortality with the top cause of congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities (congenital malformations). The report is long and filled with information, but I was looking for the simple statistics. Following is a shallow summary of the 135 page report.
National Vital Statistics Reports
Volume 57, Number 14 April 17, 2009
Deaths: Final Data for 2006
Mortality experience in 2006
· In 2006, a total of 2,426,264 resident deaths were registered in the United States.
· The age-adjusted death rate, which takes the aging of the population into account, was 776.5 deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population.
· Life expectancy at birth was 77.7 years.
· The 15 leading causes of death in 2006 were:
1. Diseases of heart (heart disease) 631,636
2. Malignant neoplasms (cancer) 559,888
3. Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke) 137,119
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases 124,583
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries) 121,599
6. Diabetes mellitus (diabetes) 72,449
7. Alzheimer’s disease 72,432
8. Influenza and pneumonia 56,326
9. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis (kidney disease) 45,344
10. Septicemia 34,234
11. Intentional self-harm (suicide) 33,300
12. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 27,555
13. Essential hypertension and hypertensive renal disease (hypertension) 23,855
14. Parkinson’s disease 19,566
15. Assault (homicide) 18,573
16. All other causes (residual) 447,805
· In 2006, the infant mortality rate was 6.69 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
· All causes ................................................ 28,527
· The 10 leading causes of infant death were:
1. Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities (congenital malformations) 5,819
2. Disorders relating to short gestation and low birth weight, not elsewhere classified (low birthweight) 4,841
3. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) 2,323
4. Newborn affected by maternal complications of pregnancy (maternal complications) 1,683
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries) 1,147
6. Newborn affected by complications of placenta, cord and membranes (cord and placental complications) 1,140
7. Respiratory distress of newborn 825
8. Bacterial sepsis of newborn 807
9. Neonatal hemorrhage 618
10. Diseases of the circulatory system 543
11. All other causes (residual) 8,781
I find it interesting that as the Democrat leadership continues to point at the Republicans as the hold up on the passage of the health care legislation, the country as a whole is watching the pro-life democrats withhold their aye votes as long as there is federally funded abortion language remaining in the bill. Even as Speaker Pelosi proclaims such witticisms as the bill isn’t about abortion, doesn’t have abortion in it and that we just need to see what is really in the bill by passing it and getting beyond the debate, it is Democrat Representative Bart Stupak that is heading the standoff. Then there is the following gem from an interview with National Review Online.
Sitting
in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life
Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview
with National Review Online.
“That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the
votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill
without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off
one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made
clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”
And…
Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”
What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
In the report, Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States, from the Guttmacher Institute, the number for abortion exceeds one million.
July 2008
INCIDENCE OF ABORTION
• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 69% among blacks and 54% among Hispanics are unintended.
• In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000. From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, about two percent of women aged 15-44 have an abortion; 47% of them have had at least one previous abortion.[3]
Add this information to the #15 Assault (homicide) 18,573, and suddenly the #1 Heart Disease is a distant second place on the list.
With the current economic struggles in our country, how many of us have really considered the economic impact of killing off nearly fifty million Americans over recent years? Social Security, the great Ponzi scheme that it is, has been and is now in dire straits due to the work force being too small for the number of retirees it needs to support both now and in the near future. Add in the number of workers and consumers and we get the current results of the financial crisis.
Consider the following numbers while thinking about the vacant houses, declining enrollments and the concocted need for illegal alien workers. They are from All American Life League.
Abortion and Planned Parenthood
Statistics
by ALL
Released October 5, 2005
Abortions in the United
States
Total number of abortions in the U.S. since 1973: 48 million +
Abortions per year: 1,200,000
Abortions per day: 3,288
Abortions per hour: 137
9 abortions every 4 minutes
1 abortion every 26 seconds
The financial considerations are great and appear to be one of the issues considered by our legislators according to Rep. Stupak. This is of course a great financial interest to companies the likes of Planned Parenthood.
The financial aspect is however dwarfed when compared to the moral considerations. Abortion and the accompanying attitudes has cheapened the perception of life in our country and the results can be seen around us through school shootings, domestic abuse, domestic terrorism and the lies we need to tell ourselves each day to alleviate our guilt. Could the financial desperation we are currently experiencing be partly the judgment for our sin?
We can choose to not look at abortion as murder and conveniently leave it out of the homicide statistics. We can blindly defend it as a legal practice in most parts of our country. We can even deny that it has anything to do with the cheapening of life that influences other crime. What we cannot deny is that the lost population is the lives of people we will never know. It doesn’t even matter that some had potential greatness. What matters is that they were each a human life.
Fight on Representative Bart Stupak. Stand your ground on the principle of life for you do not know whose liberty is the next to be snuffed out by your fellow politicians.
A couple more articles of interest are:
100 million ‘missing’ girls
IN INDIA each year, it is estimated that as many as a million baby girls are aborted by parents determined not to raise a daughter. Those unborn girls are the victims of a fierce cultural preference for boys — and of modern imaging technology that makes it easy to learn the sex of a baby in the womb. Ultrasound scans started becoming widely available in India in the 1980s; since then, an estimated 10 million female babies have been destroyed during pregnancy.
Sex-selection tests are illegal in India. So are sex-selective abortions. But the laws are rarely enforced and easily circumvented. Rather than openly disclose the sex of a fetus after an ultrasound exam, for example, some Indian doctors signal the results by giving the parents pink or blue candies or candles. Others dispense with subtlety altogether, advertising their services with such brazen slogans as “Spend 500 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later’’ — an allusion to the potentially crippling dowry that an Indian bride’s parents are expected to pay when their daughter gets married. Many couples have taken that deal. The result is an alarming shortage of young Indian women — and a growing population of young Indian men with little prospect of finding a wife.
Gender genocide
One recent Unicef report estimated that that figure had already been far surpassed, with 7,000 fewer girls born in India every day because of sex-selective abortion – though this calculation has since been questioned – amounting to more than 2m “missing girls” a year.
Not that those who choose to terminate a pregnancy for such reasons ever admit it. To do so would be tantamount to confessing a criminal offence, even though laws banning the use of ultrasounds to reveal the baby’s gender and sex-selective abortions are rarely enforced. Many doctors skirt the law forbidding disclosure of the sex of a foetus by using signals such as handing out pink or blue sweets or candles after an examination. Some families talk instead of “miscarriages”. Given the demographics of villages like Dera Mir Miran, it seems many such “miscarriages” must have occurred. Dera Mir Miran – population around 790 – is situated in a district called Fatehgarh Sahib, which in India’s last census in 2001 had the lowest ratio of girls to boys at birth of any district in the country. This census revealed that nationally the number of girls born per 1,000 boys was 927 (figures gleaned from a sample of 1.3m households in 2004 suggest this number had fallen in three years to 882). The natural birth rate globally is around 950; in China it is 832. But in Fatehgarh Sahib in 2001 it was 754, and in some villages less than 500. In Dera Mir Miran it was just 361.
[this is good] I regret, that, I can help nothing, but it is assured, that to you will help to find the correct decision.
Posted by: Oliver Freese | 08 June 2010 at 04:48 PM