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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:

Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?

Personally I've thought more about the dynamics of state level abortion bans. The result of banning it in some states and allowing it in others is that you only ban it for the poor, stupid, low conscientiousness, hesitant, unconnected. Which means there probably won't be any increase in babies born to high IQ, high conscientiousness women who have the money for a bus ticket. While I'm not broadly in favor of eugenic policies, I am broadly opposed to dysgenic ones. It simply isn't practical to ban abortion at the state level in most states.

Before I was pro abortion in some cases, against it in others. Now, having thought about it more, I'm very against it on a state level. Probably a national level ban is the minimum to achieve any benefits. I still think it should be handled socially rather than legally.

It seems like we have real world data on the decline in abortions(most of which is probably from Texas, which is the big state with the least abortion access)- is it concentrated among blacks, poor, stupid, apathetic?

I'll have to look into it, but I think what we're looking for isn't abortions per se but changes in number of live births. It's not really a question of who gets abortions, but of who has more kids as a result. I would be shocked to find out that there was any change in the birth rates of upper-income highly-educated Texan women. I might even expect a decline, as reduced abortion access leads to a climate of fear and less sex overall. I think we'll have to wait 1-2 years to really see how it shakes out though.

As for race, Abortions are overwhelmingly non-white, looking at @FirstfullOfCrows data below the only states with a majority of white abortions were 90%+ white.

It skews black and rural when you consider % of population.

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/

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