Population rising. Birth rate falling.

T Stokes London sends -

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/

EXTRACT

More women over 40 are choosing to get pregnant and have children when they’re over the age of 40 than was the case in 1998 AND more women over the age of 40 are terminating unwanted pregnancies today than they were in 1998, and is solely because the number of women choosing to have babies at that age has increased faster that than number of unwanted pregnancies that the overall proportion of pregnancies ending in a termination has fallen.

Simples.

What about younger women, especially teenagers?

Remember, Steve’s already made the claim that abortion rates are going up amongst younger women as more pursue higher education or a career. Is that true?

Let’s look at the trends for under 16s, under 18s and under 20s, and on these graphs the solid lines shows actual annual data, again in rates per 1,000 women, while dotted lines show the underlying trajectory of the overall trend.

And would you look at that, conception and birth rates have both been falling since 1998-2000 and have accelerated downward since 2007, and even the abortion rate has taken a fairly significant downward turn since 2007.

Now, you may not be aware of this but the earliest published variants of the aphorism about lies, damned lies and statistics that anyone’s every managed to track down don’t actually use the word ‘statistics’ at all. What they say instead is that there are ‘liars, damned liars and experts’ and its just about at this point in Steve’s article that he decides to wheel out his chosen ‘expert’.

Earlier this month the ONS said that unemployment and worklessness are the key reasons influencing teenage pregnancy, and played down lack of free contraception or sex education as a cause.

Professor David Paton of Nottingham University Business School said yesterday: ‘Teenage pregnancy rates have only been going down since 2008, by which time the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy had already spent a lot of money.

‘The rate has still been going down since the TPA ended in 2010.

‘It confirms what we already know from the scientific literature – reducing teen pregnancy is not a matter of more contraception and sex education.’