I disagree, so that’s that.
That’s been that for about 800 posts now!
No, it’s me talking about the notion of women “expelling” rapists and how the idea is so ludicrous no one ever talks about it in terms of rights…if they’ve ever talked about it all, which I very much doubt.
Perhaps next time you could be more clear as to what you’re referring when you make such statements as “conservatives having a hard time with rape”. Had you phrased it as “I’m going to cherry pick a few ridiculous things said by a handful of conservatives out of the eighty million or so in this country and pretend it applies to all of them”, I’d have had a better (and much more accurate) idea of what you were talking about.
I’m optimistic but for different reasons. Opinions about abortion are strongly heritable (in the 0.55 range, IIRC: see the paper “Heritability of attitudes: a study of twins” by Olson et al. 2001). And pro-life women have substantially more children than pro-choice ones, to whom they are presumably going to pass on their heritable psychological traits. So I’d guess we are at Peak Pro-Choice about now, and society is going to take a turn towards being more restrictive towards abortion in future.
That’s too similar to the Marching Morons argument, that people with more intelligence have fewer children, therefore humanity is evolving toward idiocy.
Political viewpoints are only pseudo-heritable. We all know liberal parents with conservative children, and vice-versa. Education is a large influence, and, of course, personal experience is huge.
(I can imagine that some fundamental personal characteristics might be genetically heritable. Gentleness vs. roughness, kindness vs. selfishness, empathy vs. sociopathy. These characteristics, however, are, themselves, only loosely correlated to political leanings. But specific ideological positions on highly partisan political subjects are almost certainly not genetic.)
Pro-choice people are not pro-abortion they are pro the life of the already born. Many who call themselves Pro life are against the rights of the already born, so they are pro birth because they don’t seem to care about a woman or her already born children. They would rather spend the money to travel all over the country picketing clinics etc. rather than spend the money and time helping the already born and let their God handle the rest.
Society used to be extremely restrictive towards abortion, and getting an illicit abortion put one at some risk of bodily injury and/or death (thereby potentially removing people willing to seek abortions from the gene pool). Given that, where did the pro-choice people, much less a pro-choice majority or plurality, come from in the first place in your theory?
Pro-choice and pro-life women didn’t differ strongly in fertility in the past.
Do they now? A lot of mothers are pro-choice. They’re lucky enough to have babies they wanted. And a lot of pro-life women use contraceptives.
Yes. Among the cohort born in 1980, pro life women have around 50% more children than pro choice ones , according to data from the General Social Survey.
Well, whatever. If politics is reproduction, then Hispanics will govern the nation in a few decades, and they tend to be pro-life…but also Democratic. Predicting the end of the pro-choice movement on this basis also means predicting the end of the Republican Party. An interesting trade-off…
So your theory is that the actual science is wrong, but that eventually science will reach conclusions which at the present time are known only to yourself and other anti-abortionists?
But since nothing that the pro-life crowd has ever said has ever made any scientifically supportable sense, and has always been religiously and/or emotionally driven and frequently correlated with similarly irrational prohibitions against terminating life support for brain-dead comatose patients, I would concur with the other poster who suggested that you shouldn’t hold your breath for your side ever winning anything on scientific grounds.
Your first problem is the implausibility of the idea that ideologically-motivated views are somehow both heritable and invariant as science and culture advance. Children don’t necessarily adhere to their parents’ ideologies, often the opposite, but more than that, they are influenced by the changing world that they grow up in.
Your second problem is that this reality has been playing out for years in the progressive changes in abortion laws around the world:
Also in the above article, one can see that progressive liberalization of abortion laws has been a strong trend among advanced industrialized democracies, while underdeveloped backwaters (the ones, incidentally, with the least respect for civil liberties in general) have tended to retain the most restrictive laws.
How this is supposed to be a winning argument for the pro-lifers is incomprehensible.
The highest birth rates in the country are among Mormons and Hasidic Jews, not Latinos.
I’m sure the Republican Party will disappear someday (which I won’t shed any tears over), but everything else being equal, we can extrapolate something about the cultural tenor of society from reproductive trends nowadays, and what we can extrapolate doesn’t look especially good for cultural liberalism.
Just because people identify as “pro-life” doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have abortions, odd as that may sound. In particular, Hispanic women have disproportionately high abortion rates, as do black women and low-income women in general.
See also: “The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion”:
A good point, although kind of sad. Most of us hold viewpoints a little closer to The Golden Rule than that.
The referenced paper doesn’t make that claim. It’s just trying to explain the relative lack of further abortion reform in the US in recent decades after the major liberalization of prior years. The prevailing trends, in the US and around the world, are pretty clear, as I’ve already indicated, and it’s mainly third-world backwaters with little respect for civil liberties that are sticking with archaic abortion laws just as their laws are oppressive in many other respects.
I’m not quite sure what to make of your prediction but as near as I can tell it’s that religious pro-lifers are breeding like rabbits so the US will eventually become a theocracy. Thus, it will make its laws accordingly, bucking the trend of progressive enlightenment in the rest of the industrialized world. What might be called the “Marching Mormons” hypothesis. It’s a stretch, to say the least, and it contradicts the evidence of what has actually and understandably been happening around the world.
Of course that doesn’t mean all Hispanics, but the South American countries have one of the largest populations and the most poverty.
One anti-abortion protestor told me “You should be grateful your mother was pro-life.” Never mind that I was obviously born before legal abortion.
I asked him “How do you know my mother was pro-life?” He replied “She gave birth to you, didn’t she?” I asked “And pro-choice people don’t give birth?”
He walked away.
Annie-Xmas: If that weren’t so sad, it would be a bit funny! My mother, too, was pro-choice, all the way. She chose to have kids…and respected other women’s choice if they didn’t want to.
Seems so easy to comprehend, and yet it escapes so many on the other side.
While liberals of course believe quite differently, viz. that their behavior is the only correct one.