Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Selling Positive Pregnancy Tests

A news story.  The hot new thing to sell:  one of those drugstore pregnancy tests, into which some other (pregnant) woman has peed for you.  She is pregnant, and so you can (if you are a woman; sorry, Samuel) go into the bathroom, switch the one you bought at the store for the one you bought on Craig's List, and...emerge with a positive result!

Presumably to get your boyfriend to ask you to marry him (question:  what if he just bails?  That is useful info, isn't it?).

Or, if you are the "other woman" and your sugar daddy tries to break it off?  Just show him this little bundle of joy and demand money for the pregnancy termination (if I may be delicate) and hush money.  That fake positive test could be worth $10k, easy.

So, clearly the woman buying the test is behaving badly.  But is the woman selling the test (a) exploiting her unborn child?  (b) being exploited?  (c) behaving badly?  (d) innocent as long as she says, "I know NOOOOTHING!" like ol' Schultzie?

With a nod to frequent reader, first time commenter, Matt P.  Thanks!

1 comment:

  1. P(A|B) = (P(B|A)*P(A))/(P(B|A)*P(A)+P(B|~A)*P(~A))

    Of course, we know that the folks who fall prey to these sorts of shenanigans aren't very good Bayesians.

    ReplyDelete

Do you have suggestions on where we could find more examples of this phenomenon?