[Avodah] The importance of statistics

Chana Luntz Chana at kolsassoon.org.uk
Sun May 17 09:01:21 PDT 2020


Just been listening to R' Asher Weiss in:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2reEtHkU
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2reEtHkU&feature=youtu.be>
&feature=youtu.be

 

And while  I fully agree with his response on the pandemic,  in the course
of his shiur, he brought up one of my bugbears, in that he compared a Magen
Avraham on the risk of women dying in childbirth to a Magen Avraham on the
risk of a spider falling into one's food and one choking on it and dying,
and in each case the Magen Avraham lists the risk as one in a thousand, but
in the spider case says one cannot kill the spider on Shabbat, but in the
case of the woman, one can violate all of hilchos shabbas to attend to her
needs.  And RAW posits it as a contradiction, and explains that in certain
cases the statistics don't matter.

 

And while I have no problem with the distinction he draws out of this for
the pandemic, the problem I have, that I have had over and over again, is
that people misquote the risks of women dying in childbirth without modern
medicine.  The reality is that without modern medicine, the risk of a woman
dying in childbirth is much, much, higher than one in a thousand.

 

For example for some real statistics, here is the rate of deaths of women in
childbirth in England starting in the 1700s:

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/

 

And as you can see, the figure there with only eighteen century medicine is
not one in a thousand, but more than one in a hundred live births.  Ie that
is for each birth, and the risks get higher as a woman gets older and has
more children.

 

And again, looking at statistics today, in some parts of the third world the
risk of a mother dying in childbirth is 6%, see:

 

https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality

 

We do not have accurate statistics from further back in history, but joining
together what we know about the risks in the third world today, with the
risks as it was in the earliest time we have reasonable statistics, ie the
eighteenth century,  have heard it estimated that it might have been at high
as one in three women dying in childbirth (not necessarily with the first
child, or the second, but over the course of her childbearing) in or around
the time of the gemora.  

 

And even if it is not quite that high, the Magen Avraham in this case still
has to be seen as lav davka one in a thousand, or at best what could be
achieved with maximum care in his day. Today, we can do better, the best
performing countries Finland, Greece, Iceland, and Poland have that for
every 100,000 births, 3 mothers die.  But I think it is important to
understand that this sort of rate will occur only so long as we continue to
push aside Shabbas prohibitions for any needs of a woman in childbirth.

 

That said, the statistics if you are elderly of surviving coronavirus are
not great either, and, even if you are a young adult, with a relatively low
risk profile, the statistical risk of passing it on to someone with a much
higher one if you are out meeting people is very high, because this thing
is so infectious.

 

So the message that RAW is putting out is, IMHO, greatly needed, but the
reference to the statistics keep bothering me.

 

Regards

 

Chana

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20200517/81ecf9c9/attachment.html>


More information about the Avodah mailing list