There were comments, hither and yon, about whether people were dying older today than they were in olden days. Some said yes, some said it was only an illusion, perhaps because of increased infant survival rates. So I thought I’d look. And did. The results are down below (spoiler: we are living longer), after something more interesting.
As I was looking, I noticed a strange artifact in the data. The number of people killed before they could escape their wombs were not counted in the official death data.
I counted. Here for the USA is a plot of the proportion of all deaths, by year, of those killed inside their would-be mothers.
There were many years in which those who were killed in the womb almost equaled those who died outside of them; i.e., nearly half of all deaths were caused by womb-killing. I find this a remarkable number. Perhaps you will, too. Even though the proportion is lower now, it is still enormous.
The same graph for England Wales is below, after the details.
Details
Every year people of all ages die. Some are killed before or during their exits from their wombs. The womb-killed bodies were not in the official death numbers tracked by the respected Human Mortality Database, from where I retrieved all other death counts by age and year (for many countries). Their data is often the result of their own models, which you can read about there. Meaning there is some uncertainty to all you see here.
I sometimes added the womb-killed esimates/counts to the HMD category “Age 0”. Problem is, there is some plus-or-minus to the womb-killed numbers, especially before 1973 when it was still illegal for women to kill their kids. It still happened, of course, because Americans are traditionally free spirits and scoff at unwelcome laws. But it didn’t happen at rates as great as they would when Equality hit. My counts and estimates are from the Guttmacher Institute, a group well known for tracking these things.
Their numbers before 1973 are a rough estimate based on surveys and the like, numbers which were difficult to come by or to entirely trust because womb-killing was against the law. Even after it was legal, each year wasn’t counted perfectly, though accuracy did improve with time. For missing years, I linearly extrapolated guesses.
In 1950, for instance, their estimate is 600,000. By 1955 they estimated 700,000. My extrapolation guess for 1951 is 620,000. And so on. The peak, says Guttmacher, was 1.6 MILLION in 1990. You see that brutal era in the plots. Numbers are indeed lower now, but that’s mainly because fewer people are attempting to procreate and because of the increased use of birth prevention devices and drugs (“the pill” is almost routine for many now). But I think, too, the drugs women take soon after coitus to poison any conception are not counted.
Also, women are just plain older now, on average, and so fewer can become pregnant. Reality does not acknowledge Equality, even though we must.
Anyway, we are left with uncertainty. Some periods are more uncertain than others, which is why I denoted the period before 1973 with a specially colored line (white in black).
I have no estimates of miscarriages, which rightfully belongs to the early, infant, or Age 0 category. That is, current guesses of rates can be had now, but getting them historically is a problem. It’s difficult to predict whether these numbers have declined with increaseing medical capabilities, or if they have instead increased if we include IVF, which are largely planned mechanical miscarriages, since most of the lives made with IVF are snuffed out.
All these caveats are important, and make a nice area for study for some aspiring sociologist or demographer. You already know fertility rates are declining everywhere rapidly, at the same moment most cultures reward the sexually sterile the most. Indeed, non-reproductive activities are seen almost as kinds of superpowers. It’s very strange.
However, our topic is death, and at what ages it occurs.
Deaths
USA
Statistics like life expectancy have their uses, but one-number summaries of complex distributions always suffer in one way or another (see below). They can mislead and cannot give a full picture of what is happening. But we can. Here is a frequency distribution of death age—the age at which people were recorded to have died—for each year of available data. This is for the USA. This does not have the womb-killed numbers.
You have to stare at the sequence a few times until you become accustomed to what’s happening. Most obviously, infant deaths used to be huge and have dropped to seemingly small numbers. It’s only seemingly because womb-killing is not included in these numbers, which I’ll do below.
It also becomes clear that age at death is increasing: we are dying at older ages than before. The question we began with has been answered: People are living longer now. Up to a point. Always up to a point. The maximum here is “110+” (which I coded as 115). This, or even a little before at 105, appears to be some kind of wall which once hit is fatal, with only a very few slipping under the crack. Another way to say it: the maximum lived age is not increasing, or is but not by a perceptible amount.
This pattern is repeated in all the countries the HMD has. They do not have all countries. And even in some of those they do their data has limited historical scope. There is nothing in Africa, and only Chile represents South America. East Asia is limited to Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. No China. South Asia and the Middle East, except Israel, is missing entirely.
I’ll include a couple of other countries below the fold. Too many at once can be dizzying.
You can see the Baby Boom strolling to their Final Exit. Watch that “horn” walk upwards to the end. The horn is the male-female difference. HMD breaks their data down by sex, and in the animation below we learn only the old wisdom that men die earlier up until about 80 years old, after which women outpace men. Which means women are hardest hit.
The green line, if you hadn’t noticed, demarcates the more men than women: this is just the ratio of male deaths to female deaths. It is not only in times of war that young men, say around 20, die at three times the rate of women. But perhaps it is remarkable that even at the youngest ages more males than females die. Until the weakest are cleared out. By age 80, the men who made it are more robust and the women start slipping under faster.
We can see population increases in the first animation, or rather infer them, by the increasing numbers of people dying at all ages. But we can’t see everything. We don’t see births or immigration, nor emigration. So we don’t, in these plots, learn where the increased numbers are coming from.
Here is the same animation as above, but now adding the womb-killing to Age 0. Startling, is it not? It still astonishes me that men allow women to kill their children.
England & Wales
We begin with the proportion of deaths attributed to womb-killing (here data is from the UK itself and Johnston’s archive, with the same caveats about about uncertainty; i.e. do not swear to any particular numbers). This is only England & Wales and not Scotland.
It’s curious that the rate is still increasing here. England’s rulers are welcoming foreigners with the same ardency of lonely maidens holding the door open for vampires. Perhaps it is the foreigners who are assimilating to the native culture, at least in womb-killing. Or perhaps the natives, exhausted by the endless lies of their rulers, are giving up. You tell me.
Here is the death distribution animation, as above (no womb-killing included):
Don’t miss the ludicrous bump centered around 20-year-olds about 1940. There are some other peaks that come and go along the way of local interest. The early high-infant-mortality is there, as before. In any case, it’s true here that people are dying older.
I won’t bother adding in the womb-killing for another animation. It has the same depressing shape as in the States.
Two One-Numbers
There are other ways to display the data besides animation, but all require great screen space and much scrolling. As I said above, one-number summaries can provide insight, but at the cost of easy interpretation. Still, people hanker.
One idea is to look at the proportion of deaths over 80 (or 85) years old through time. Another is to look at the mean age of death for all those who died after, say, age 5. The reason for after 5 are those “bi-modal” peaks in the death-age distributions. If you make it past 5, there’s a good chance you’ll make it a lot longer. Other possibilities exist, of course, but with these we can look at many countries at once. There is no womb-killed in the data below.
Start with the proportion of deaths over 80 by country:
It’s hard to pick out individual countries, but our point here is not any particular place, but all. It’s clear enough an increasing number of those equal to or greater than 80 are dying. There is a kind of dispsy-doodle in the 1960s.
Another reason why single-numbers fail: consider we have a cohort (say born in 1930). The proportion of those dying at age >80 in 1940 would be 0, and same in 1950, but there’s be a jump at 2010 to some positive number, which would only increase after that but only because the cohort itself is growing older. That happens, too, to a certain extent in the main death data, but not as much, and there we know we have immigration and births.
Here’s the same for 85:
Same story. Now the mean age of death for those who make it past 5:
The devastation of WWII is there. Wiped out a good chunk of young men (women hardest hit). WWI would be there, too, if the data started early enough. No big signal for the covid panic.
Video
Other Countries’ Animations
WARNING! Your eyes can go buggy staring at these. But for the sake of completeness, here are a few other representative country animations. For our main question—are people dying older?—they are much the same. Those interested in individual countries might take some benefit, too.
Taiwan
Chile
Poland
Netherlands
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