Inductivist

Political parties have gotten more polarized in the past few years. Is this true for abortion attitudes, too? Using General Social Survey (GSS) data, I created the following graphs:

Liberal Women

In 2006, 60% of self-described liberal women favored abortion for any reason. That number grew and jumped from 2018 to 2021. It's now 88%. 

Liberal Men

We see the same trend for liberal men. By 2021, the percent in favor was 79%. Currently, few liberals have a problem with unrestricted abortion. 

Moderate Women

It's trended up for moderate women as well. They are now at 54%

Moderate Men

Moderate men are now at 57% approval. 

Conservative Women

By contrast, attitudes among conservative women have stayed fairly steady, the current level of approval is at  27%.

Conservative Men

The story is similar for conservative men. They are currently at 34% approval. Overall, conservatives have not changed much, whereas liberals have veered left on the issue, especially in the last few years. There is more consensus among liberals than conservatives. 

This is a great article at Slate that provides evidence that later onset of sex and increased use of IUDs in particular have reduced teenage pregnancy and abortion significantly. The author explains that people, especially young people, do not use condoms or take the pill reliably. And it sounds like modern IUDs are superior to the old ones. (Thanks to Jason Malloy).

Here are additional correlates of contraceptive use and abortion cross-nationally:

More Muslims, less birth control (r = -.39)
More Muslims, less abortion (r = -.15)
More blacks, less birth control (r = -.51)
More blacks, less abortion (r = -.26)
Higher mean IQ, more birth control (r = .65)
Higher mean IQ, more abortion (r = .20)

The cross-national correlation between contraceptive use and fertility is very large; it's -.66 for 172 countries (UN and CIA data). Not surprisingly, low fertility nations have high use rates. Rates in Europe are typically 60-plus percent for women of childbearing age who are in a relationship. The region with the lowest level is Western Africa where the numbers are roughly 10-20%.

Birth control is much more predictive of small families than abortion is. For 59 countries, the abortion-fertility correlation is only -.14. You might suspect that contraceptive use is inversely related to abortion and thus weakens the observed abortion-fertility correlation, but the fact is that high birth control countries also tend to be high abortion countries: the correlation is .12 for 59 countries. Reliance on birth control doesn't reduce abortion rates. Evidently, societies vary in their concern over fertility, and those with a high level of concern tend to focus on birth control as the first line of defense and abortion as a complementary backup.

For a sample of 59 countries, the correlation between sex ratio (WHO data) and the abortion rate (Guttmacher data) is -.26. In other words, countries with more men tend to have a lower abortion rate. The feminist interpretation of this would be that men are anti-abortion (i.e., they like to control women). The problem with this is that, at least in the United States, surveys indicate that men support abortion in numbers similar to women; they are just don't care about the issue as much.

Women usually turn to abortion when having a baby is inconvenient, and not having a stable relationship with a man is a major factor. It is not surprising, then, that societies that have a shortage of men (or suitable men) have high rates of abortion. The case of blacks in America is consistent with this view. Because of factors like male imprisonment, unemployment, and a lack of desire to commit, black women face a situation where there are always men ready for sex, but few who are available, willing, and suitable for a long-term relationship. The result is lots of abortions.

My wife and I stand with our brothers and sisters who will be marching for life in DC tomorrow. I've posted a clip by one of my favorite priests, Father John Corapi (you can watch him on EWTN). I like to call him General Corapi.  Would that all eunuchs for Christ had his cajones.

By the way, I need to get me a job on the East Coast so I can participate in all the great political events I miss. Did you get the word that the National Policy Institute is going to stream live the American Renaissance conference in North Carolina on Feb. 5-6? I plan to put on a suit and tie just so it feels like I'm there. I've never attended, but I remember when I first saw Jared Taylor on C-SPAN in 1996. I had read The Bell Curve but thought the AmRen folks were nuts. Later, I read Paved with Good Intentions and all the other great race realist books from the 1990s, and was convinced by 1998. If there were any lingering doubts, they were completely destroyed when I read Jensen's g Factor.

I just read Auster's Path to National Suicide and want to cry that I didn't not read it when it first came out in 1990. According to the book, "his appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 1991 marked the first time the cultural impact of immigration was critically discussed on national television." I was just a kid at the time, and "Crossfire" got me interested in politics. Just my luck that I missed the program with Auster--I might have avoided years of liberal foolishness.

In the late 80s and early 90s, GSS participants were asked if they have ever served in the military. Slightly more than 20 percent of gay men (of all ages) said they had. This is a much greater estimate than we would get for young gay men now, but let's stick with it. According to CNN, only one-sixth of gay enlisted men plan to come out now that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy will be ended. So multiplying the two percentages gives us 3 percent of gay men who will ever make use of the new policy. According to research, around 3 percent of all men are gay, so if we multiply 3 percent by 3 percent, we get basically 1 out of 1,000 men who will ever be affected by the change in policy. The number would be probably be even smaller for women since there are half as many lesbians as gay men (according to the GSS, 21.6% of lesbians say they have served). 

I'm pleased that the Democrats feel so good about themselves after getting the policy changed, because otherwise it kinda seems like a waste of time. 

Personally, I wish lawmakers would focus on issues slightly more important; for instance, whether the hundreds of thousands of embryos and fetuses that are killed every year are immature humans or not.      

Want to reduce teen pregnancy? Then make it hard to get an abortion. Using state-level data, Marshall Medoff finds that raising the cost of abortions, Medicaid funding restrictions, and informed consent laws lower rates of teenage pregnancy. The author concludes that youths are more careful about sex if abortions are harder to get.  

This study shows that policies short of prohibition of abortion can lower rates. In a state-level analysis, the author found that parental involvement laws, regulation of abortion providers, and Medicaid funding restrictions in particular reduce abortion levels.  

According to this study of U.S. states, the perceived threat of HIV lowered the rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.  The PC strategy of scaring the hell out of heterosexuals turned out to be a good thing. 

Oh this is fun. I see that the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences says:

Abortion was almost universally illegal in the early twentieth century. This first changed in the early years of the Soviet Union, where from 1920 to 1936 abortion was legal, widely available, and encouraged as the primary method of fertility control.

I guess contraceptives were not bloody enough for Bolsheviks.

Jews approve of abortion more than almost any demographic group in America. Using GSS data, I calculated that 75 percent of Jewish women believe a woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason. I don't have data on the percentage of unwanted Jewish pregnancies that are terminated with abortion, but it should be higher for a group of people who don't see anything wrong with it. This might help explain why 23 percent of Jewish women ages 40 to 59 have no children (GSS data).

Our country needs all the scientifically gifted people we can get, and Jews contribute disproportionate numbers of talented people. It's a shame that almost a quarter of Jewish women fail to have even a single child.  

From pages 69 to 73 in The Clash of Orthodoxies by Robert P. George:

 A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing 23 chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing 23 chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a single-cell human zygote containing, in the normal case, 46 chromosomes that are mixed differently from the 46 chromosomes found in the mother or father. Unlike the gametes (that is, the sperm and egg), the zygote is genetically unique and distinct from its parents. Biologically, it is a separate organism. It produces, as the gametes do not, specifically human enzymes and proteins. It possesses, as they do not, the active capacity or potency to develop itself into a human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Assuming that it is not conceived in vitro, the zygote is, of course, in a state of dependence on its mother. But independence should not be confused with distinctness. From the beginning, the newly conceived human being, not its mother, directs its integral organic functioning. It takes in nourishment and converts it into energy. Given a hospitable environment, it will, as Dianne Nutwell says, "develop continuously without biological interruptions, or gaps, throughout the embryonic, fetal, neo-natal, childhood and adulthood stages--until the death of the organism." 

Some claim to find the logical implication of these facts--that is, that life begins at conception--to be "virtually unintelligble." A leading exponent of that point of view in the legal academy is Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School... Rubenfeld argues that, like the zygote, every cell in the human body is "genetically complete"; yet nobody supposes that every human cell is a distinct human being with a right to life. However, Rubenfeld misses the point that there comes into being at conception, not just a clump of human cells, but a distinct, unified, self-integrating organism, which develops itself, truly himself or herself, in accord with its own genetic "blueprint." The significance of the genetic completeness for the status of newly conceived human beings is that no outside genetic material is required to enable the zygote to mature into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, the fetus into an infant, the infant into a child, the child into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult. What the zygote needs to function as a distinct self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.

At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called "substantial change" (or a change of natures). This is the point of Justice Byron White's remark in his dissenting opinion in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that "there is no non-arbitrary line separating a fetus from a child." Rubenfeld attacks White's point, which he calls "[t]he argument based on the gradualness of gestation," by pointing out that, "[n]o non-arbitrary line separates the hues of green and red. Shall we conclude that green is red?"

White's point, however, was not that fetal development is "gradual," but that it is continuous and is the (continuous) development of a single lasting (fully human) being. The human zygote that actively develops itself is, as I have pointed out, a genetically complete organism directing its own integral organic functioning. As it matures, in utero and ex utero, it does not "become" a human being, for it is a human being already, albeit an immature human being who will undergo quite dramatic growth and development over time.

These considerations undermine the familiar argument, recited by Rubenfeld, that "the potential" of an unfertilized ovum to develop into a whole human being does not make it "a person." The fact is, though, that an ovum is not a whole human being. It is rather, a part of another human being (the woman whose ovum it is) with merely the potential to give rise to, in interaction with a part of yet another human being (a man's sperm cell), a new and whole human being. Unlike the zygote, it lacks both genetic distinctness and completeness, as well as the active capacity to develop itself into an adult member of the human species. It is human cellular material, but, left to itself, it will never become a human being, however hospitable its environment may be. It will "die" as a human ovum, just as countless skin cells "die" daily as nothing more than skin cells. If successfully fertilized by a human sperm, which, like the ovum (but dramatically unlike the zygote), lacks the active potential to develop into a human adult member of the human species, then substantial change ( that is, a change of natures) will occur. There will no longer be merely an egg, which was part of the mother, sharing her genetic composition, and a sperm, which was part of the father, sharing his genetic composition; instead, there will be a genetically complete, distinct, unified, self-integrating human organism whose nature differs from that of gametes--not mere human material, but a human being.

These considerations also make clear that it is incorrect to argue (as some pro-choice advocates have argued) that, just as "I" was never a week-old sperm or ovum, "I" was likewise never a week-old embryo. It truly makes no sense to say that "I" was once a sperm (or an unfertilized egg) that matured into an adult. Conception was the occasion of substantial change (that is, change from one complete individual entity to another) that brought into being a distinct self-integrating organism with a specifically human nature. By contrast, it makes every bit as much sense to say that I was once a week-old embryo as to say I was a week-old infant or a ten-year old child. It was the new organism created at conception that, without itself undergoing any change of substance, matured into a week-old embryo, a fetus, an infant, a child, an adolescent, and finally, an adult.

But Rubenfeld has another argument: "Cloning processes give the non-zygotic cells the potential for development into distinct, self-integrating human beings; thus to recognize the zygote as a human being is to recognize all human cells as human beings, which is absurd."

It is true that a distinct, self-integrating human organism that came into being by a process of cloning would be, like a human organism that comes into being as a monozygotic twin, a human being. That being, no less than human beings conceived by the union of sperm and egg, would possess the human nature and the active potential to mature as a human being. However, even assuming the possibility of cloning human beings from non-zygotic human cells, the non-zygotic cell must be activated by a process that effects substantial change and not mere development or maturation. Left to itself, apart from an activation process capable of effecting a change of substance or natures, the cell will mature and die as a human cell, not as a human being.

Although Embryo offers an argument against killing embryos as part of scientific research, many of its points can be applied to the issue of abortion. It is written by Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, the same university where the odious Peter Singer is employed.

His arguments go something like this--I hope I don't butcher them:

1. Ontologically, we are human animals.

2. The merging of male and female gametes creates a new human organism, a new member of the species Homo sapiens.

3. There is a transformation in kind--in category--as we move from gametes to embryo. An embryo is a new human organism--a gamete is not. An embryo is thus an ontologically different kind of entity than a gamete, but there is no change in kind for the rest of this embryo's life. There are different stages of maturation--fetus, infant, child, adolescent, adult--but there is a scientific consensus that there is no change in the kind of organism being discussed. It is a human organism and no other kind of organism at all stages. How far back do "I" go? To the moment of fertilization. All other points are arbitrary.

4. Embyros are categorically different from somatic cells. They are not part of a human organism; they are a human organism. If a somatic cell were turned into an embryo, it would be a human organism.

5. What gives an embryo its humanness is its nature. Its nature is programmed into it from the moment of its existence. It does not become human when it develops sentience, or the immediately exercisable ability to think, or when it develops self-awareness. These are all arbitrary points (not to mention that they imply moral status for sentient beings all of species, or they remove moral status for babies who have not developed the mental abilities yet). The nature that leads to self-awareness, for example, is in the embryo in the same way that it is in the newborn.

6.  People who privilege sentience, self-awareness, etc., are mind-body dualists. They say, "I am a mind who possesses a body, and I do not exist unless my mind exists." Others will argue, "I am my brain."  That is brain-body dualism. The truth is that humans are animals. The correct statement is, "I am a body--an integrated system." We are integrated organisms--not minds or brains. When I look in the mirror, I don't see a mind. I don't see a brain. I see a naked ape with glasses.

7. Since there is nothing but non-essential differences between embryos and more mature humans, they deserve moral status like mature humans. They thus certainly deserve the most obvious of all human rights--the right not to be killed. These embryos are humble: they're more than willing to dispense with the right to a living wage.


UPDATE: George does not make this point, but I would also argue that psychological biases lead people to view an embryo as less than human. First, since we can't see it, we reduce it to something less than a human organism. Second, we have a bias which says, "If it looks like a human, it is one; if it doesn't, it isn't." This bias enables people, for example, to have sex with plastic dolls or to think the female alien in Avatar is hot.

In college, I worked nights as a security guard and occasionally felt certain that there was some evil presence in the dark, empty building I watched. The reasonable thing for me to do was to recognize and ignore the bias. It would not have been reasonable to call the Ghostbusters.

Here we see a similar pattern for men asked the same question in this decade (N = 3,060). Once again, access to abortion is a concern of educated people. Educated men want the autonomy to facilitate a move up the social ladder, so abortion is a vital option since children are long-term, expensive entanglements. Elites are preoccupied with freedom and money and status. Kids are not a priority.

As shown by the graphs, some ordinary people have these concerns--many do not. But this kind of thinking is the norm among elite Americans. If we look at women with 20 years of education (the highest category in the GSS data) the number in favor of abortion for any reason rises to 70 percent (data not shown). Among these women, it's the norm. Abortion is for the educated.  

You guys have got to make sure you read comments that go along with posts; otherwise, you miss people like Jason Malloy. I want to summarize his analyses and comments in the post on the relationship between a Darwinian outlook and fertility.

First, belief in evolution is associated with less fertility, independent of theological positions. Second, he reminded readers of my finding that acceptance of evolution predicts a pro-abortion position after controlling for atheism and liberalism.

Third, Jason looked at the predictive power of believing that scientists always seem to be prying into things that they really ought to stay out of. It looks, however, like he is comparing the size of logistic regression coefficients. They are unstandardized estimates and so reflect the metrics of the independent variables. To double check, I'll estimate standardized OLS regression coefficients. (In the case of being in favor of abortion for any reason, I know that I'm violating the assumption of a normally distributed dependent variable, but a statistician friend assures me I can get away with it as long as the skew is no more than 75/25.)

The table shows that believing scientists do not pry is associated with a pro-choice position, but the prediction is not stronger than either political views or belief in God. Although the sign of the coefficient for being pro-scientist is in the predicted direction for family size, the relationship is not significant--an N of only 227 doesn't help (I limited the sample to those ages 45-59 for the fertility analysis). Finally, while political orientation and atheism predict number of sexual partners, a pro-science stance does not.

Like Jason's findings, these show some connection between supporting science and having liberal sexual views and behaviors, but results are not as striking or consistent as suggested in the comments of the earlier post. Jason did much more, but I'll have to look at that later.

The feminist movement has convinced many Americans, especially members of the middle and upper classes, that women, like men, need occupational prestige. An admirable woman earns an advanced degree and works a prestigious job that makes her a lot of money.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this kind of cultural value system is dysgenic. Children become understood as obstacles to status. A smart women is much more concerned about status and about not ending up a loser with no education and no career, so she is much more motivated than a dull woman to have kids later and to have fewer of them. She is also more aware of how today's behavior affects her future, so she is more cautious and prudent.

So how do contraceptives and abortion figure into this? Both are tools to reduce fertility. The first prevents pregnancy, and the second terminates a pregnancy.  These tools are going to be used to the extent that a woman is motivated to avoid getting pregnant and to avoid having a child, and to the extent that she considers the long-term consequences of her actions.

The data clearly show that the tools of birth control and abortion are used much more frequently by educated women. In this Guttmacher study, researchers showed that women with a college education are much more likely to use contraceptives and to have no gaps in use. Not surprisingly, uneducated females are much more likely to get pregnant.

Like it or not, what this shows is that birth control is dysgenic; it decreases the fertility of the top-half of the population while expanding it among the bottom-half. (I'm not morally opposed to birth control by the way--quite the contrary--but dysgenic is dysgenic.)

I've already shown in a earlier post that, among pregnant women, the educated are much more likely to get an abortion. Faced with a pregnancy that jeopardizes her road to social status, the smart women gets rid of the kid while the untalented girl keeps it.

For a person concerned about the declining quality of our population, the heart of the problem is a culture which tells a gifted woman that if she wants to be somebody she has got to give up having more than one child to pursue a high-status career. But contraception and abortion are the tools given to her to get the job done. They are part of the problem.

Many who are concerned about population quality applaud birth control and abortion because they are  focusing on the fewer births among the bottom-half. The racialist impulse leads some to favor widespread abortion among NAMs. But in their rush, they overlook the fact that the contraceptive/abortion regime works its magic much more on the talented top-half.

The core of problem is that we've been duped into desiring the means rather than the ends. Evolution gave us a hunger for status so we would be able to attract a mate and provide for all those babies. Children were the goal and all the stuff was just the way to get there. Now we worship the means and can't see that it's the humble among us who have all the riches.

Talented people need to get that message, but more on this in another post.

This table reports the results of an analysis of the outcomes of more than 500,000 pregnancies (Social Forces. 1991. 69:1121). The numbers under the heading "Gross" are the percent of women in a particular category who opted for an abortion rather than giving birth to the child. Numbers under the "Net" heading are more important since they are the results after controlling for relevant variables.

I'm interested in the estimates for various levels of education--a proxy for intelligence. You can see that, whether we look at adjusted or unadjusted numbers, the probability of abortion for unmarried women rises dramatically with education. Given a pregnancy and focusing on the adjusted figures, a single women with at least a bachelor's degree is 2.8 times more likely to abort the child than someone who didn't get past the eighth grade.

The chance of an abortion for married women is curvilinear: it reaches its peak of 12.59% among women with 12 years of schooling. Compared to abortions by married women, those gotten by single women are more important since they are by far more common (according to the study, 76% of all abortions are by single women).

So this huge and carefully done study indicates that abortion as it is practiced in the Unites States is dysgenic.

Flesh and spirit: Over at iSteve, we see that liberals continue to worship the Scandinavians and are mystified by their efficiency. More than once, Steve has made the emperor-has-no-clothes point that, duh, Scandinavians are so... Scandinavian. The funny thing is that we totally get his tautology. He's not saying that their institutional arrangements are efficient, or that they have the right culture, or that they act as they do because of historical circumstances. When you talk about identity, we automatically think biology.

Why do people get angry when HBD-ers claim that the racial IQ gap is part genetic, and not when others say that blacks are dumb because of bad schools? It's because we believe that we are our genes, but we are not our environment. At the genetic level, egalitarians tell us, we're all potential Einsteins. Our true selves are awesome, it's just the institutions are bad.

This is all very convenient for liberals, but I detect an inconsistency. When I was in student, profs kept assigning readings that argued that on the question of abortion, nurture trumps nature. The body doesn't matter; it's culture that defines who you are. Then I'd read about some exotic tribe that doesn't consider you human until you can speak. Much of social science sees human beings the same as religious folks do: minds or spirits residing in a house of flesh. But it adds a collectivist twist that all spirits are interconnected and the product of each other. So which is it? Is our core spirit or flesh? Come on now: flesh is the only serious answer. You can have flesh without spirit, but no spirit without flesh.

Okay, you say, but what about all the biologists who are pro-choice? My guess is this, and people should weigh in an tell me where I'm wrong. It's overkill to call it the Mengela Syndrome, but it does get at the phenomenon that familiarity and science breed callousness. I don't have data, but many doctors and nurses seem to favor things like abortion and physician-assisted suicide because the job requires one to objectify the patient. It's too hard to get your job done if every person you treat is as human as, say, your own child. You might respond that they see a lot of suffering and want to relieve it. Fair enough, but science in general encourages the objectification of humans. There is a tendency to see them as objects to be manipulated. As much as I respect science, it is one cold bastard.

(Also--science breeds secularism which breeds liberalism, and people often pick their views to match those of their political party.)

Reader Mark nails it:

"If I put some of my cells in cold storage so that I can be cloned later after I die, would it be murder to destroy those cells?"

Each of your cells is one tiny part of your body, not an individual organism in and of itself. The sum of your cells - i.e., your entire body - *is* an individual organism, with the wondrous capacity to walk, talk, and make specious arguments on the comments section of blogs. Similarly, the sum of a human zygote's cells is an individual organism - a human organism - and the fact that this human organism has not yet developed the ability to walk, talk, or speak out in its defense doesn't make it any less of a human being -- any more than an infant's inability to, say, appreciate art makes it less of a human being.

"A zygote is a little closer to a full-fledged human."

No, a human zygote *is* a full-fledged human, merely at a very early stage of his or her development, just as a human infant is a full-fledged human, just at a slightly later stage of his or her development. Being a human being - i.e., an individual member of the human species - isn't something that we achieve as we age. Pro-choicers make the mistake of confusing their subjective prejudices with objective reality. Because they can't see or relate to an embryo, zygote or fetus as a human being, they think it's not a human being. Instead, it's a "potential human being." Really? What species of animal is a "potential human being?" What is that species' scientific name?