Articles and Essays

Pro Life Expectancy – the Actual Actuarials

 

 

Pro Life Expectancy - a look at the actual actuarials
by Dr. Robert Bennett


Thanks be to God
for all our pro-life priests, including:

Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, founder of Human Life International
Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of HLI
Fr. Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life
Fr. Misael BacLeon, my parish pro-life padre.

And our pro-life laity, including:

Brian Clowes, HLI

Mark Crutcher, Life Dynamics Incorporated
Chris Slattery, Expectant Mother Care


Lifetimes to die for….

930 - 912 - 905 - 910 - 895 - 962 - 365 - 969 - 777 – 950

The numbers are astounding, stunning our modern sensibilities, a far-off dream for modern medical science. Is it possible that the original patriarchs from Adam to Noah really completed these incredibly long lifetimes?

This question was once quite easy to answer. Of course they are truly and literally years, as these numbers are taken directly from the Book of Genesis, a didactic and factual account of the beginning times of humanity.

But the modern age is skeptical, a questioning age. As some illiteralists claim, was the Bible author counting months, not years? This 'interpretation' of years compressed by 12 would bring the patriarchal ages in line with lifetimes today.

Then what of Gen 5:21 ?

When Enoch was sixty-five years old, he became the father of Methuselah.

If years are really months, then Enoch sired his first son when he was about 5 1/2 years old!

And a day of creation would shrink to about two hours. It's ironic that another group of liberal scripture revisionists, the theistic evolutionists, assert that time isn't compressed at all, but expanded….. greatly expanded. The thevolutionists say that a creation day is really millions or even billions of years!!

Another favored dodge is: maybe the Biblical ages are just symbolic of importance and greatness, conferred as a mark of esteem and respect.

If so, then a man we know little about, except for his age and genealogy, is the greatest - Methuselah! Among the least would be the Lord Jesus Christ, who died in His thirties.

Or perhaps the tradition of literal exegesis that preceded modern times is correct. Incredibile dictu, maybe a year is a year is a year is a year. Let him with eyes to see, see.

Embracing this literal tradition, let's see what we can see.

The average age of the first ten Biblical fathers is 857 years - about 14 times a modern man's life expectancy! But even this average may be a case of short change. We are told

"Enoch walked with God, and he was seen no more because God took him"

(Gen. 5:18-24).

Tradition says that Enoch (365 yrs) and Elijah, who was taken up to the heavens in a fiery chariot, will return in the End Days. And Lamech (777 yrs) died 10 years before the Flood - was he, like Noah, spared death by drowning? Without these two included, the average life expectancy rises to 929 years, more than 15 times a modern man's expectation.

But these years have obviously severely declined through the ages up to the present, a trend that is rooted in the consequences of sin. Death entered the world via the original sin of Adam and Eve. Virtually universal wickedness on earth then led to the global deluge, followed by rapidly waning life spans (to be documented below).

From Psalm 90:10, the prayer of Moses,

As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,
Or if due to strength, eighty years,
Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow;
For soon it is gone and we fly away.

Now, we take a look at the pattern of aging in human history.

The second age group extends from Noah's sons to the Egyptian captivity - Shem to Isaac: 600 yrs. to 180 yrs. The average lifetime is 305 years, with an approximately exponential decline.The third age includes the time in Egypt up to Exodus - Jacob (147 yrs) to Moses (120 yrs). The average lifetime is 135 years, with a continuous drop in age apparent with each generation.

bennett_life_expectancy_1

Fig. 1 The History of Average Lifetimes

The chart above (Fig. 1) summarizes the decline in life expectancy through out Judaeo-Anglo history. There is said to be a recovery now in progress, in modern times, a topic to be taken up in detail in the following.

Summary of Human Life Expectancy

Life expectancy in the United States from 1900 to the present shows an overall steady rise, reflecting improved health conditions in general, the result of advances in medical science, hygiene, personal care, health technologies, and public health administrations. The rise decelerates asymptotically to a near plateau from the 1950s to the 1970s, reflecting an epidemic of coronary disease.

Now, the modern age, for which we have many statistics on the average life expectancy, varies widely and wildly across national and cultural boundaries. The longest lives today are enjoyed by the people of Andorra (come on: you know where that is…): 83 years. And the lowest lifetimes are found in the equatorial belt of Africa, specifically 37 years expected for the natives of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Andorrans live an average 46 years longer than Zambians, 2.25 times as long!

At 77 years, the average American is close to the longest national lifetime, but many other countries (41) live longer, of the world's 230 nations and island-states. This puts the USA only in the 81st percentile, despite its huge infrastructure of medical support, emphasis on improving living standards and the world’s sole super-power. People in one country out of five have a higher quantity of life, quality notwithstanding.

For future reference, the Average Life Expectancy (ALE) for a few major countries and the whole world is ranked in Table 1 below.

Domain

ALE: Average Life Expectancy

Rank

USA

77

1

China

72

2

Russia

67

3

The World

64

-

India

63

4

Table 1: Summary of Average Life Expectancy (ALE)

To correct for the gender dependence in these average lifetimes, add a few more years for the ladies, drop a few for the men.

There is a prevalent image of China as an undeveloped nation of grim life expectation, with its people coerced by the government to limit their free choice of family size. But China is 8 years above the global average life expectancy, only 5 years lower than America and 5 years beyond Russia, whose life expectancy is pretty low for a developed nation and former super-power. The average lifetime statistic for these two countries is a bit of a surprise, for those who correlate life expectancy with standard of living.

We see that the modern global average lifetime of 64 is about half that of mankind at the time of Moses, fitting the same post-diluvian exponential pattern of decline. So the after-effects of the First Judgment (the original sin of Adam and Eve) are still present in us and evident to us today, as we see and participate ourselves in an ever-shrinking life span that will presumably continue into the future. This is the presumption, for there has certainly been no universal repentance by mankind, or turning to God, that would justify reversing His judgment.

A reversal in the downward spiral?

But have we considered all the facts? A respected reference logs a worldwide average lifetime of 46 years in 1950, more than 50 years ago, which would be an increase in average lifetime of almost 40% since then.

Well, a word of caution. Demographic statistics for many countries today are very sketchy and qualified as 'estimates'; how much more so are the 'estimates' of 50 years ago?

Support for an average lifetime increase in the 20th century does come from other sources. One report says that today's newborn girl can expect to live 24 years longer than in 1920, and men 19 years longer. This dramatic increase is said to be due to 'heroic' (sic) medical procedures in areas such as reproductive health care, among other causes. Infant mortality is now 8 deaths per 1000 births in 1995, compared to 26 per 1000 in 1960. Because of highly infectious diseases, life expectancy was low but stable at around 25 yrs for the last 2 millennia, until the late 19th century. The reasons for the recent surge in projected life spans are said to be disease control and other public health improvements.

As before, let’s begin with a word of caution. Where in the world does anybody get reliable life span statistics for the last 2,000 years ??! The error in today's average lifetime is about +/- 3 years!

Nevertheless it does seem a consensus in society today that medical advances have wrought a reversal in mankind's falling life expectancy, a decline due to the self-inflicted fall-out from our 'wages of sin'.

Satan’s modern spawn

The argument is sometimes made that abusing the literal meaning of Scripture has little effect on moral perspectives. Whether creation or evolution is true, we are told, is a question to be resolved by science, as it marches on, every day, in steady progress toward improving the general welfare and standard of living.

This modernist attitude is refuted by the progressive and degenerative moral effect produced by rejection of, first, geocentrism in the 17th century, then special creation in the 19th century, and now the very existence of human life in the womb in the 20th .

The theistic evolutionists and Scriptural revisionists have twisted the literal meaning of Genesis to accept both biotic and cosmic evolution. This denial of the literal content of Revelation continues in the modern world when applied to the ontology of a person in the womb, resulting in the massive global slaughter of the youngest of the young by abortion, and soon by embrycide, on an incredibly massive scale.. By claiming ambiguity in knowledge of the pre-natal identity (the Supreme Court’s excuse in 1973) the modernists choose to ignore or deny, rather than attempt to interpret, the words of the Bible that, again and again, repeat the truth of the human life growing in the womb.

Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers? Job 31:15

If only I had never come into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave! Job 10:19

Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? Job 3:11

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. Psalm 139:13

From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother's womb you have been my God. Psalm 22:10

This is what the Lord says- he who made you, who formed you in the womb, and who will help you: Do not be afraid, O Jacob, my servant, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen. Isaiah 44:2

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah 1:5

In the womb he grasped his brother's heel; as a man he struggled with God. Hosea 12:3

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.Luke 1:41

Let him with eyes to see, see.

Enter, the pro life perspective

Among the modern health boons are said to be the ubiquity of reproductive health care and the reduction in infant mortality rate.

But don’t the UN and Planned Parenthood both include abortion as a contradictory component of modern reproductive healthcare? And doesn’t the neo-natal infant mortality rate ignore the pre-natal time from conception to birth, for which both science and the Church agree that the building of a human life is in progress?

Without this development time in the womb, a human birth could not occur. Even at birth this process is not complete; the development of mind and body will continue to full maturation for about 21 more years.

Including gestational time in the womb would add less than a year (5 to 9 months) to the true average lifetime - hardly worth mentioning, as that's smaller than the error in the statistic itself.

But if we included the culture of life and scientific view, that all life begins at conception, the pre-natal lives lost by the 'heroic' medical procedure of that specific reproductive ‘service’ known as surgical abortion would have to be included in the calculation of the ……average pro-life expectancy (APLE) …. truly a whole new bunch of apples.

Rethinking life expectancy…

Millions/year

% of P

ALE * Birth rate = APLE

64 yrs * 67% ~ 42 yrs!

Pregnancies

225

100

Miscarriages

20

9

Abortions

55

24

Births

150

67

Table 2: The Average Pro Life Expectancy (APLE), World-wide

Table 2 contains a global outline of the pro-life expectancy actuarials.Most data sets do not report the number of pregnancies for countries, but the number of births.

To compute the true average life expectancy based on the beginning of life at conception, the average pro-life expectancy, the usual life expectancy measured from birth must be re-evaluated using the fraction of pregnancies (= pre-natal lives) that are reduced by miscarriages or abortion. This is about 1/3, from Table 2. Most of these occur in the first trimester, so these lives have a prenatal expectancy of about 0.3 yr.

In general, the Average Life Expectancy (ALE) * Birth rate =

Average Pro Life Expectancy = 42 yrs,

as in Table 2.

So, when abortions and birth rate are properly factored into the actuarials, then national average lifetimes drop as shown in Table 3 below.

Domain

Abort Rate

Birth Rate

APLE yrs : Rank

USA

.22

.69

53 : 3

China

.021

.89

64 : 1

Russia

.66

.25

17 : 5

The World

.25

.66

42 : 4

India

.021

.89

56 : 2

Table 3: National Average Pro Life Expectancy (APLE)

The ratio of abortions to births is around 2% for India and China , reflecting their religious and cultural attitude toward abortion. To our shame, one child is aborted for every three born in America , and our pro-life expectation for survival now drops below China and India.

But the astounding item is Russia, where five persons are surgically aborted for every two that are born! The years of atheistic Communism have yielded not bad fruit, but no fruit. The tree of life for the Russian people is barren and moribund; anyone conceived in Russia today can expect to live only 17 years when abortion statistics are included.

The rosy media spin for an improving average lifetime is now unmasked as a false conclusion drawn from a false premise: that human life begins at birth. The real life-spans are substantially reduced when surgical abortions are included, using the average pro life expectancy. But there is more analysis to come - and the news is not good, not good at all.

The Crusher - Silent Chemical Abortions

Chemical contraception by pill, injection or implant is thought by the general public to be independent of the pro-life vs. pro-abort debate. The pill is assumed to prevent conception by completely blocking ovulation, and the popular media does not discourage that assumption. But medical proof of a horrific link between contraception and abortion has been slowly escaping the culture of death filter since 1989 and is now well-documented in the press and on-line. Convincing research now addresses the truth concerning the reality of a chemical contraceptive abortion. The technical medical details documented in these articles go beyond the scope of this life-expectancy survey; they are summarized in the following.

A Survey of Contraceptions

The U.S. Bureau of the Census reported the prevalence of contraceptive use among married women in the world's ten largest countries:

  • in China, over 75 percent of married women used contraception,
  • in India , nearly 40 percent,
  • United States, 70 percent,
  • Brazil, almost 80 percent,
  • Russia, almost 70 percent,
  • Japan, 65 percent.

In addition, the UN Development Plan noted that:

  • in North America alone, 71 percent of married and/or cohabiting people use contraceptives.
  • worldwide figures show that 58 percent of married and/or cohabiting people use contraceptives.

A survey of several thousand U.S. women found that:

  • the most popular contraceptives (female or male) were female surgical sterilization (28% usage) and oral contraceptives (27%).
  • none of the other female contraceptives had secured the allegiance of more than 3% of users.

From American Life League pamphlets:

The combined birth control pill is a hormonal method of contraception containing two hormones, estrogen and progestogen. The first impedes ovulation, the second principally blocks implantation.

The POP or mini pill contains only one hormone - progestogen. It works by acting on the cervical mucus, encouraging it to form a thick barrier to stop sperm entering the womb, and makes the lining of the womb thinner, to prevent it accepting a fertilized egg. It also can be implanted or injected.

Both pills are abortifacients - they impede implantation of fertilized eggs.

They are ‘abortion-makers’, since mini-pills with no estrogen allow ovulation 50% of the time and the newer low-estrogen pills allow “breakthrough” ovulation in up to 20% or more of the months used. Such a released ovum is fertilized an estimated 10% of the time. Those tiny new lives which result, at our present “guesstimations”, in 1% to 2% of the pill months, do not survive. The reason is that at one week of life this tiny new boy or girl cannot implant in the womb lining and dies.

Oral contraceptives have 4 effects:

  • Suppression of ovulation, the production of an human egg
  • Thickening of the cervical mucosa
  • Alteration of the uterine lining (endometrium) to impede implantation.
  • Changes in the Fallopian tube movements

So, contrary to popular thought, the 'pill' fails to stop ovulation in every menstrual cycle. One report showed ovulation took place in from 2 to 10% of pill user cycles; another that the ovulation rate was 4.7% for pill users. Should the egg be fertilized before reaching the womb – i.e., a pregnancy - the freshly-formed person will starve to death, since the uterine wall cannot provide support, a side effect of the pill's steroid hormones.

Not all such 'breakthrough' ovulations result in pregnancy, since it depends on the frequency of intercourse; intercourse rates are said to vary from 25% to 68%.

The chance of having a so-called ‘silent’ abortion in a year, which is rarely detected by the mother, can be found by combining the probability of a viable ovulation while on the pill (.047), the probability of a fertilization taking place (a conservative estimate is taken: .41) and the number of menstrual cycles per year(13).

Using these conservative estimates the annual chance of a contraceptive abortion is

.25 or 25%. Stated in more familiar terms, each year a contraceptive/chemical abortion will silently occur to at least one out of four women using the birth control pill in the United States, resulting in the death of a newly conceived person, a death neither recognized or included in abortion statistics.

Birth Control in America

Statistics from pro-abort sources omit the important demographic inferences to be drawn from the abortion-contraception nexus, such as the inferred abortion percent for each contraceptive type and the range of infant mortalities that will result. Although the fraction of US women using an Intra-Uterine Device (IUD) is relatively low, the IUD is projected to be the killer of almost 4 million prenatals, the largest number of any contraceptive category. Since the IUD blocks implantation of the embryo in the womb, this causes ALL fertilizations to be aborted, unlike the pill. The widespread use of IUDs in China and its contribution to silent abortions has been documented in a detailed version of this paper (see notes).

The number of US women estimated to be using birth control pill, injections or implants is 12 million. From this single fact the following inferences can be drawn.

  • Application of the silent abortion rate of .25 to these women implies that 3 million (3,000,000) will have an early/silent/chemical abortion each year.

  • This is about 2.3 times (130%) more than the visible/surgical rate!

  • The total abortions per year of both types, surgical and chemical, are about 4.3 million (4,300,000).

  • Incredibly, this is more than the number of births each year in the USA!

  • Excluding the 400,000 annual miscarriages, more than half (53%) of pregnancies result in an unnatural death.

  • For every 4 women contracepting chemically, there will likely be one early abortion each year.

Consistent with the pro-life position that life begins with the zygote, the number of silent abortions worldwide and by country can be estimated from the projected number of potential mothers that use the pill - women of child-bearing age (15 à 45 years) and chemically contracepting. The number of women that are potentially impregnable worldwide is about 48% of all women. And women are about 52% of all humanity, so the number of potential mothers is about 1.5 billion (1,500,000,000) candidates for motherhood.

For each nation, this statistic can be obtained from 25% of its total population.

The number of true pregnancies has to be logically increased by the failed contraceptions that produce a fertilized egg. They are separated now into two types: visible and early/invisible, and abortions into surgical and silent. The number of invisible pregnancies is virtually equal to the number of silent abortions; there are very rarely any survivors.

This statistic differs from those that don’t include silent abortions, so we introduce the total average pro-life expectancy (TAPLE), summarized below in Table 4.

Domain

Contracepting
Rate

Number on the pill (millions)

Abortion Ratio

Adjusted
Birth Rate

TAPLE in years

USA

.70

49

10

.22

17

China

.75

225

4.5

.81

58

Russia

.70

28

2

.11

7

World

.58

870

4

.33

21

India

.40

100

40

.47

30

Table 4: Total Average Pro Life Expectancy (TAPLE) by Nations

The table should be studied carefully, for its meaning is devastating:

  • The attitude toward contraception in the three major world powers of America , China and Russia is clear. Three quarters of fertile women in these countries choose at least one form of artificial birth control.
  • In all countries studied in the table there are more projected pill abortions than surgical.
  • The impact of the fourth column, the ratio of pill to surgical abortions, is truly staggering. Ten times more Americans die at the hand of the pharmacist than the 1.2 million that die at the hand of the abortionist – a total of more than 13 million each year, more than three times the number of births….

Domain

ALE:Rank

APLE : Rank

TAPLE : Rank

USA

77 : 1

53 : 3

17 : 4

China

72 : 2

64 : 1

58 : 1

Russia

67 : 3

17 : 5

7 : 5

The World

64 : 4

42 : 4

21 : 3

India

63 : 5

56 : 2

30 : 2

Table 5 – Summary of all Views of Life Expectancy

  • What do we now have to match the patriarch's ages of nine centuries? A global true life expectancy of 21 years, thought to be the beginning of adult life!
  • Americans lose 60 yrs from the 77 years that conventional wisdom assigns to our tenure on earth and drop from highest average lifetime to next to lowest.
  • The Chinese ironically turn out to have the longest age expectation measured truthfully - from conception. One of the most oppressive countries in terms of human freedom and rights turns out to be the one with the highest lifetime potential.
  • Incredibly, in Russia the projected true mean age is only single-digit; such is the legacy of Communism. Of all alive in Russia today half will not reach their eighth birthday!
Brave now world

The future portends an even grimmer version of the culture of death. Within the horizon of medical technology lie more truly frightening possibilities. Today we have continued the abysmal slide into a world of pre-natal horrors that include:

Embryos suspended between life and death in cryostats, the frozen victims of the In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) industry. Almost all of these will be eventually 'discarded'; a few will survive to be born to surrogate mothers, which now must include the artificial womb as a technical possibility. The embryonic survival rate here is less than 1%.

There are others that are not frozen, the euphemistic 'therapeutic' embryos that are legally guaranteed a lifetime of less than 2 weeks, within which they will be used as medical commodities or in lethal experimentation. They will be dismembered at the cellular level, a form of microscopic vivisection equivalent to medieval torture on the rack, to 'harvest' their stem cells and for sale as experimental subjects, like current patented strains of white lab mice.

Or their fate may be to be poured down the drain when their stem cells are no longer useful and to prevent implantation of any cloned embryo in a womb.

Then there are the embryos that are experimental fodder for modern medical research, using the specious term, ‘stem cell research’….

Were Huxley to write a sequel to Brave New World today, it might include embryo farms like this -

At the Orrin Hatchery laboratory technician Embrycidia, spotless and sterile in her white lab coat, walks past the numbered stainless steel incubators and stops at # 30. She peers through the glass-paneled door, gets the times and dates of storage from the built-in database, then opens the door. She selects the sixth tray from the stack and brings it to the processing room, where the best five will be selected from the tray of 10,000 genetically identical embryos for triage and further consideration for womb implantation. The rest are poured into the noiseless drain of a garbage disposal unit…

She crosses the street to the Moreau/Mengele Clone Clinic where a similar collection of embryos is being examined and dissected under powerful microscopes to satisfy an ever-growing demand for stem cell research. Here sufficiently differentiated embryos are subjected to vivisection via microsurgery to obtain candidate stem cells for growth in culture dishes. The professionals who perform this task are called micro-butchers.

There are rows upon rows of body parts being grown to custom order; nerve cells, muscle cells, liver cells, heart cells…. Embrycidia pauses and peers into a Petri dish and idly muses, “ ..wonder what these brain cells are thinking?”

She continues on to another wing of the building, the Singer Institute for Ultra-Dysgenics. Here the focus is on genetic redesign of future generations. To this end an army of technicians employs cloned cells replicated from genetically superior donors to engineer ‘designer’ babies. Researchers experiment on the control of gene expression, interaction and development in order to alter existing genes in the cloned embryos. Any resulting products less than perfect (she calls them ‘dysgens’), which are not acceptable to the order placer - before or after delivery - are humanely incinerated in a NIH government-approved crematorium.

What will be the annual embryonic death total in this barely hypothetical glimpse at the future? If the world regains its moral sanity, zero. If not, each 20 to 25 million dead embryos will cause the global life expectancy to drop another year from its present level of 21 years. The scope of such an abomination buries in its immensity and callousness any comparison to the twentieth-century genocidal pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

Epilogue

So the trumpeting of ‘heroic’ medical technology advancing our collective lifetimes is built on a lie, the vapid moral and spiritual vacuum of materialism that denies pre-natal life. The drop in average age continues a real decline since the creation of the world, driven not by a true bio-ethics but a thanato-ethics, the banner of the culture of death. Under that banner, fellow-traveling with the aborters, contracepters and cloners, will be found the evolutionists and Big Bang cosmologists, united in a common cause – atheism in practice.

But we are not powerless in this abysmal slide. The Master has taught us all we need to know and, as Savior, He has sacrificed Himself for ALL of us, as our Father willed. He warned us that without Him we can do nothing, yet He promised to send an Advocate, the Spirit of God, to guide us. Has not Our Lady repeated the same message to us through centuries of apparitions: prayer, penance, fasting?

And we know the ending well; it has already been written down. Revelation speaks of the final days, when Christ will return as the Warrior King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Faithful and True, to settle once and forever with the Prince of Lies and his followers. From His mouth shall come forth the fearsome double-edged sword, the Word of Truth.

Then

Judgment

and

the Lake of Fire

Note:

Complete support for the data referenced and the statistical claims made herein is found in an extended technical version of this paper.

 

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