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bergercreek t1_iu4kfnn wrote

Reply to comment by IMakeMeLaugh in [OC] Worship vs Fertility by dbabbitt

Fertility doesn't have anything to do with contraceptives, unless you're claiming contraceptives affect actual fertility, which may be true. Fertility is separate from birth and pregnancy rate.

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IMakeMeLaugh t1_iu4lan4 wrote

I’m saying weekly worship attendance is a proxy for access to contraceptives.

The graph firstly defined the Y axis as fertility. I am aware of the semantics around fertility/fertility rate/birth rate, but again I was just using the OP’s example.

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magnesiumb t1_iu4ty3l wrote

I’d suspect you wouldn’t find a correlation because contraceptive access is probably similar across the board in many low income countries. While they probably have the higher fertility rate overall still, access to something says nothing about uptake. In addition years of HIV advocacy by NGOs has pushed condoms as a means of HIV prevention as well, so there are health reasons why people would use condoms that wouldn’t conflict with their religious beliefs — if there is one in these countries that’s preventing contraceptive use. So to even get the contraceptive access data you have to define what access even looks like.

You’d probably find more of a pattern mapping average incomes or rural vs urban or the education of the mothers (this almost always tightly correlated).

I don’t even trust this data since there’s no way these are accurate reports of country wide worship attendance.

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