Risky Business

One of the presenters in the family planning plenary at the Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference said the following sentence: "Based on the available data, X group of women are at an increased risk of becoming pregnant." Does that strike anyone else as odd? Because it no one in the auditorium so much as flinched when he said this. Except me.

"Risk" of becoming pregnant, huh? I just wonder what people my grandmother's age would think of a public health assessment like this. Sure, relative risk is a statistical term we epidemiologist employ to compare groups of people. And I know that this is likely the context in which this presenter was using the word "risk", but it STILL strikes me as odd.

Maybe odd is the wrong word. Sad might be more appropriate. It's sad that what we've been genetically programmed to do has becoming a risk. At least half of the world's pregnancies are unplanned, most also unwanted. The population boom of the past 50 years has seen poverty increase, food stocks decrease, and a shifting mindset where we have to consider welfare services for this overpopulated, undereducated world. Family planning is revolutionary (and no, family planning does not necessarily equal abortion like so many people think). Family planning has been forecast to be one of the more green "technologies" we can invest in, saving money, trees, food, and a whole host of other things. Family planning is true primary prevention, whereas creating green technology to try and counterbalance the population explosion is really tertiary. And so as maternal and child health epidemiologist, we do, in fact, look at the risk of becoming pregnant. (And the medical complications, particularly in the developing world, are a real risk in a woman and infants live.)

It just feels so sad to say that because, I suppose, I wish I lived in a world that wasn't self destructing. A world where babies, on a population level, were special and treasured, and not drowned in sewer runoff because they are female.