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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-GB link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Just been listening to R’ Asher Weiss in:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2reEtHkU&feature=youtu.be">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2reEtHkU&feature=youtu.be</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>For example for some real statistics, here is the rate of deaths of women in childbirth in England starting in the 1700s:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>And again, looking at statistics today, in some parts of the third world the risk of a mother dying in childbirth is 6%, see:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality">https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>So the message that RAW is putting out is, IMHO, greatly needed, but the reference to the statistics keep bothering me.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Regards<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Chana<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>