At the release for UNFPA's big global annual report in the Philippines, the media highlight was about how COVID-19 will cause a huge rise (25%!) in unintended pregnancies in the Philippines.
I haven't been able to figure out what that is based on in terms of data.
At about 26 minutes here the explanation starts. It's based papers published by Guttmacher and JHU, and back-of-the-envelope estimates of changes in contraception.
Underlying Guttmacher paper is here.
They say that a "conservative" estimate of COVID's effect, a 10% decline in contraceptive use, will lead to **15 million** more births globally.
That's like a 12% increase in total global fertility.
If you think the elasticity of births globally vs. short-run modern contraceptive usage is ***1.2*** then you may be in need of a biology lesson.
They're literally forecasting that a third of women nudged off of modern contraception will conceive children they would not have otherwise.
A third of reproductive-age women not using contraceptives normally do not conceive in a given 6 month period!
In a given *year*, in countries with *extremely high* birth rates like Burkina Faso, about 30% of non-pregnant, non-contracepting women will conceive a child.
So in, say, a 6-month period, you'd expect *half* that number.
But that's in Burkina Faso. In the Philippines, in the 2017 DHS, it looks like about ***13%*** of non-pregnant, non-contracepting, prime-age women would get pregnant in a given year. So about 6-7% in a given 6-month period.
So you'd expect a 10% reduction in contraception to shift 10% of the current contraceptors to non-contraception over a 6-month period, the share of non-contraceptors conceiving rises from about 13.4% to about 14%.
For that to be a 42% increase in unintended fertility as UNFPA says for the Philippines, you'd have to assume that previously unintended pregnancy made up just 9% of all pregnancies. In reality, Guttmacher reports that ***54%*** of pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended.
So they've probably *dramatically* overestimated these effects.
In sum:
Folks, it is simply not the case that one out of every three women who can't access contraception for a few weeks or months will conceive in that timeframe. Nope. Not reality.
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I keep Lutheran in my bio mostly because it’s true but also a little bit because it helps ID people who are paid trolls who just grab random words out of your bio to use as pejoratives.
Lutherans do not have any meaningful political or ideological brand, globally or domestically. Indeed being milquetoast is practically the Lutheran political creed. And yet these trolls come out of the woodwork being like “WELL OF COURSE HE’S LUTHERAN”
If in your first interaction with a person on this hellsite you reference any part of their listed bio 99% of the time it means you’re the bad guy.
No— having every individual work in the marketplace is neither necessary nor desirable. We should not treat isolated individual career achievement as the end-all of mobility.
Also, for a lot of people, “I make more income but whereas my parents basically achieved their family goals, but I didn’t” doesn’t feel like upward mobility. Key to recognize marriage isn’t just a PATH TO upward mobility, marriage IS upward mobility for many people!
Pretty much any welfare function will treat total welfare as some function of leisure time and other variables so we should not prima facie assume differences in labor force participation we know are culturally related are necessarily “lack of mobility.”
I think it's possible to say both "the US response has been very bad" and also "Progressives have been leaping at any comparison to make the US look bad because they basically feel embarrassed about America anyways and confirmation bias is strong."
It is in fact possible that the US response has been worse than it should have been and also that the European response has been worse than it should have been, and that pretty much "the response" was determined by..... let's say March 1.
Once the disease was widespread in many countries, as it clearly was by early March, it's not clear how much influence governments could really wield in terms of preventing a major death spike.