Posted by John Nichols on September 21, 2005 at 18:12:58 from 165.91.198.54 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: Wonderful moment - Here Here! Where? Where? posted by Joy on September 21, 2005 at 13:44:35:
As one who has been through the painful process of IVF I can tell you that there is a lot more to the statement birth, copulation and death than meets the eye. I am speaking now purely scientifically so if anyone finds this distasteful please do not continue reading.
1. The birthing part is easy, ok well actually it was not at the time of Nancy's birth. A lot of women died in childbirth at that time. I am amazed that anyone voluntarily took the risk. I have seen a comparision of the risk on the front line in WW1 and the risk in child birth. They are not far apart in orders of magnitude.
2. If you are unluckly like my friends the Jarretts, (John actually introduced me to SA in the 4th grade), then your duaghter dies at 44 hours. Not a pleasant thing, nor is the funeral much fun. So some people skip step 2.
3. There is one birth and one death but unfortunatley for the prudes there is a statistical problem that only 25% of people get pregnant at the "first shot" (this was my old Doctors term for it - he did not mean it in an offensive way so please do not be offended). Based on the reduced subset then the statistics are
Month 1 100 couples start process 25 get pregnant 25% pregnant
Month 2 75 couples left 19 get pregnant (you can not impregnate someone twice if she is in the 25 in the previous month) 44% pregnant
Month 3 56 couple left 14 get pregnant 58% pregnant
(So it takes one month to do 25% of the ladies and 3 months for 50%)
Month 4 42 couples left 10 get pregnant 68% pregnant
Month 5 32 couples left 8 get pregnant 76% pregnant
Month 6 24 couples left 6 get pregnant 82% pregnant
Month 7 18 couples left 5 get pregnant 87% pregnant
Month 8 13 couples left maybe 2 get pregnant and the rest are likely to be infertile. So about 85 to 90% preggers after 8 months.
Now my old Doc told me there was a 3 to one ratio between copulation and pregnancy which means with the group of 100 we have the following monthly totals (assuming a strictly reducing pool and as I have no experience in actually impregnanting a female over the long term (one ectopic pregnancy does not count in my book) I must make this assumption based on anecdotal evidence from the locker room at the yacht club)
300, 225, 168, 126, 96, 72, 48, 39, 36 etc......
Of course there are interesting statistics in this group of integers, (births are integers - although occaisonally I think my brother is low rational number less than 1)
Minimum is 3, average is 12.18 and maximum is 36 per couple. So on average it took your parents (12.18 /0.9) or 13 to 14 to create the little spec of life that is reading this study. I am assuming as you probably want me to - most people do - that your parents were in the strictly reducing pool. I believe Michener gives similar stats in the novel Hawaii.
4. Of course for the 10% of parents left over there is IVF, getting better, 6 shots will give you on average one child, cost about 150,000 USD or adoption current China cost about 25,000 USD.
I realize this is a bit off AR, but sometimes the words birth, copulation and death bring out very sad memories for some people.
Anyway back to the fun stuff, coke anyone?
John Nichols