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The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:
The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?
Why not both?
Because 1 clearly doesn't work?
Remember all the abstinence only culture war stuff in the late 2000s / early 2010s?
Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy
It has been found difficult, and left untried.
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).
It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?
From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.
Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.
Thank you for articulating my thoughts much better than I was, what a banger
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