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On this special episode of The Russell Moore Show, author and professor Stephen Prothero discusses the overturn of Roe v. Wade and what it may mean for the United States.

Moore and Prothero talk about potential implications for other legislation like Obergefell. They consider the potential effects of the Roe v. Wade overturn on Americas culture wars. Listeners may appreciate their conversation on talking about abortion with someone who holds a different opinion, and what it may look like to have a reasoned, productive dialogue on the subject.

The Russell Moore Show is a production of Christianity Today Chief Creative Officer: Erik Petrik Executive Producer and Host: Russell Moore Director of Podcasts: Mike Cosper Production Assistance: CoreMedia Coordinator: Beth Grabenkort Producer and Audio Mixing: Kevin Duthu Associate Producer: Abby Perry Theme Song: Dusty Delta Day by Lennon Hutton

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Bonus Episode: A Conversation with Stephen Prothero on Culture Wars Now That 'Roe' Is Gone - ChristianityToday.com

A year ago, rice husks and soil samples scraped from the insides of an urn at an ancient burial site in southern Tamil Nadus Sivagalai, travelledover15,000 km to a carbon dating lab in Miami, Florida. Weeks later, the Tamil Nadu State Department of ArchaeologyTNSDAreceived an email: the paddy in the urn had been traced back to 1155 BCE.

In early September, four months after Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party chief M.K. Stalin assumed office as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, he stood in the state assembly to announce these findings. The samples confirmed that a civilisation flourished on the banks of the Thamirabarani river 3200 years ago, he said.

The Stalin-led DMK governments big push for archaeological work has reignited conversations around Tamil pride and antiquity. This coincides, and very often clashes, with the larger political shift underway in India of aBharatiya Janata Partygovernment led by its strong focus on Hindutva, its emphasis on Hindi, its harking back to the countrys Vedic past, and its attempt to build a narrative that the Saraswati river gave birth to Indian civilisation.

In the larger ideological fight over where, geographically, Indias first civilisation took root, things were heating up. In his address, chief minister Stalin dramatically upped the stakes, committing to send Tamil archaeologists to the shores of Egypt and Oman to find missing pieces of the Tamil civilisation puzzle via ancient trade relations. They were being sent to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, too.

Also Read: After the most important archaeology findings in Keeladi, now come the drawings

Within India, archaeologists from Tamil Nadu are headed to Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka and Kerala. In search of the cultural roots of Tamils, we will travel across the world. It is the duty of this government to scientifically prove that the history of the Indian subcontinent is written from the Tamil landscape, Stalinsaid.

Within Tamil Nadu, archaeologists have been at work in seven sites this yearfour existing sites in Keeladi, Manalur, Konthagai and Sivagalai, and three new locations in Vembakkottai (Virudhunagar district), Thulukkarpatti (Tirunelveli district), and Perumbalai (Dharmapuri district) where thedigging began in February. Plans to find the potentially submerged Pandyan port city of Korkai have stalled due to rough seas.

However, some fear that serious archaeological work that takes patience andrigourwill get entangled with ethnic pride and political assertion.

A source in the TNSDA, speaking to ThePrint, saidthe governmentcouldexercise restraint in how it announces the findings. Its like look at us, we are going beyond the shores to discover things. This is a celebration of the work, but what is the result? he said.

Referring to the pathbreaking findings at Keeladi, a site near Madurai, where Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script was found dating back to the 6thcentury BCE, a hundred years before previously thought, he said: If I have established that people began writing 2600 years ago, that is certainly a matter of pride. But that doesnt necessarily mean everything began from here. That attitude is dangerous, it feeds into a sort of hierarchy on which race is superior.

On 9 May this year, Stalin stood up in the state assembly once again, this time to announce findings from the excavations in a sleepy village of Mayiladumparai in Krishnagiri. He said iron artefacts dating back 4200 years had been unearthed, indicating that Tamil Nadu is home to the oldest Iron Age settlement.

It would appear that by rushing to the assembly hall before the findings had been checked by independent experts, Stalin wanted to make a political statement, CP Rajendran, an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru,wroteinThe Wirelater in May.

Ravi Korisettar, also an adjunct professor at NIAS, said while he was happy about the Tamil Nadu governments increasing support for archaeology, well-trained archaeologists in the state could advise the leaders to refrain from making hypothetical statements.

This is the situation both at the national and regional levels. Small evidence is blown up beyond proportions that certainly lack scientific scrutiny. This is much needed in 21st-century archaeology. said Korisettar. Findings should help formulate a hypothesis that warrants further work in order to test the hypothesis, this test either validates or invalidates and when validated it can be put into the public domain with confidence. Unfortunately, suggestions are taken as conclusions leading to making high-sounding statements, he said.

Also Read: Archeologist who found 4,500-yr-old skeletons in Haryana doesnt buy Aryan invasion theory

With the Dravidian party having an ideological stake in resisting theBJPgovernments Vedic supremacy politics, questions do arise on whether archaeology is used to solidify cultural identity in modern-day Tamil Nadu.

For its part, the Tamil Nadu government is showing its full commitment to the excavations by setting aside Rs 5crorefor excavations alone in 2022. In recent years, the state government has sanctioned an annual budget of Rs 3 crore for excavations.In comparison,neighbouringKarnatakas archaeology departmentreportedly receives an annual budget of roughly Rs 25 crorebut it is unclear how much of it is used forexcavations. The DMK government wants to give importance to large-scale excavations. This is one area which is neglected, when people talk about budget cuts, they lay their hands first on archaeology and museums, Minister of Industries, Tamil Culture and Archaeology Thangam Thennarasu told ThePrint.

At his residence in a leafy neighbourhood in South Chennai, he said the interest that the government has in archaeology is not for political advantage. The quest is to fill cultural gaps, to establish connectivity between sites, he said. To answer questions like who was the first to live in this land? Where did it all start? How are the sites connected?

We never want to mix politics with archaeology, that we are very clear, he said. Whatever we are doing now is only backed by scientific evidence, only if it is vetted and agreed by veteran scientists, or the archaeologists or experts, then only it is published. The government does not add any colour to it.

Thennarasu has photographs of the soon-to-be-opened world-class Keeladi museum on his phone which the state government hopes will solidify social and intellectual curiosity around the excavations. The objective is to make people realise how old our civilisation is.

TNSDA archaeologists were muted in their responses over recent findings. Since we work with public money, it is our duty to inform and since it (Iron Age finding) was announced by the chief minister it became a big deal, said an archaeologist, who did not wish to be named. This isnt a very unusual discovery. Tomorrow, if somebody is excavating in Uttar Pradesh or Andhra Pradesh, they may find an earlier date. As of today, the date of iron in India traces back to 2172 BCE, thats about all, he said matter-of-factly.

Also Read: The Class of Taxila how Mortimer Wheeler set up the first Indian archaeology school

Excitement apart, the digs in Tamil Nadu feed directly into a renewed debate on indigenous culture that the state has been undergoing specifically around questions of identity. It fosters a sense of belonging to the land and an opportunity for a belated recognition in history textbooks that are seen as being skewed toward north Indian history.

This (archaeology) could be driven by politics, but it is also very cultural, said G. Sundar, director of the Roja Muthiah Research Library. The research library runs The Indus Research Centre which is currently collaborating with TNSDA onstudyinglinks between graffiti marks on potsherds excavated in Tamil Nadu with signs found in the Indus Valley. Experts say 90 per cent graffitiisfound in South India, more so in Tamil Nadu.

Sundar and his colleagues are attempting to digitize graffiti marks inscribed on potsherds to build a concordance along the lines of what has been documented on IVC seals by late renowned epigraphist Dr Iravatham Mahadevan. His work is now digitized on this site:indusscript.in

Sundar identifies the 2017 pro-Jallikattu protests as an inflection point. Jallikattu was really a trigger for cultural identity, he said. In January 2017, thousands of Tamil youth took to the streets to protest the Supreme Court ban on the traditional bull-vaultsport that takes place around the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal.

That same year, for reasons that remain unclear, the Archaeological Survey of India, which reports to the Union government, did not approve further digs at Keeladi, where an urban settlement was unearthed in 2015. The site was subsequently taken over by the TNSDA.

When your values are not respected or come under attack, you ascertain, Sundar said. Whatever gains that were made through the Jallikattu movement, it was like, here is another episode (referring to Keeladi digs). In both cases, the place targeted was Madurai, the cultural capital of Tamil Nadu. People had become extremely conscious of their cultural heritage, and they did not want to give up, he said.

Also Read: Two Ayodhya archaeologists changed how we dig up Indias Hindu history

On the ground, archaeologists are on a quest to plug cultural gaps from the day a human showed up in Athirampakkam, near Chennai, some 1.5 million years ago. From that day, history starts, said a senior archaeologist who serves as an advisor to the state department of archaeology. Later, from the 6thCentury BCE, we have written documents in Tamili script, which gives us the name of a person. We can reconstruct the language, linguistics, grammar, society, and social structure, based on written documents. But there is a long history, how did they reach this level?

To answer these questions, the TNSDAs approach is multidisciplinary, partnering with several scientific institutions to gain a wholesome understanding of who the ancient Tamils were.

The problem is everyone, whether a specialist in Sangam Literature, archaeology or history, writes from their perspective alone, said the senior advisor. For this multidisciplinary approach, I need to take a botanist, a geologist, an archaeo-geologist, I have to retrieve ancient DNA, get maritime navigational techniques, marine engineers, study coastal geomorphology, paleochannels, metallurgy, and put all these together to get a perspective.

Dr R. Sivanantham, the commissioner of TNSDA, named a whole list of institutes that work closely with the state, including collaborations with Chicago and Harvard Universities, the French Institute in Pondicherry and Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow. Among them is the NIAS in Bengaluru.

Professor Sharada Srinivasan is a researcher of archaeometallurgy and has frequently collaborated with both TNSDA and ASI. She studied South Indian metal icons, including Chola bronzes.

In her work, she identified previously unknown production sites for wootz steel making in Mel-Sirvualur in Tamil Nadu. There is now a sequence of dates that seem fairly reliable coming in, which is pushing back the antiquity of various ferrous finds as indicated in Tamil Nadu and southern India so that the early dates for Mayiladumparai are not out of place.

Yet, she warns, the most important approach is to have findings published in peer-reviewed journals and papers that can stand up to international scrutiny.

Professor Srinivasan stresses on time as a factor. In many ways, scientific work is also challenging, and these are also preliminary findings that need more rigorous and systematic studies which require sustained and long-term support to take the investigations further, she said. It must be said that at the end of the day, all heritage, wherever it is across the globe, is world heritage and the heritage of humankind and needs to be approached, preserved or appreciated in a dispassionate and objective way.

(Edited by Srinjoy Dey)

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Stalin's archaeology push in Tamil Nadu is the stuff of culture wars. Experts have a warning - ThePrint

Over the past week, I watched two major pop culture properties become wearily inevitable targets for the kind of bad-faith discourse that has polluted my occupation for several years now. Fans of Amazons The Boys, a scathing satire of superhero stories and corporate culture, seemed aghast that this deeply political show had become, uh, political. Around this time, as we all guffawed at the Reddit screenshots, the usual suspects started ranting about Lightyear, the Pixar sort-of prequel to Toy Story that focuses on the origin story of the action figure. Right-wing rabble-rousers like Patricia Heaton tried to start drama over the decision to cast Chris Evans as this take on Buzz Lightyear over the original voice, Trump supporter Tim Allen. The tedious claims of wokeness and cancel culture were invoked for everything, including a very brief gay kiss that saw the film banned in Saudi Arabia. The movies soft box office opening from this past weekend inspired further smarmy nonsense, but mercifully, it hasnt gained as much traction as stuff like this often does. Perhaps were all too exhausted from the heatwave to care.

I bring these two examples up, as minor and entertaining as they are, because they ended up perfectly embodying the obvious artifice and ignorance that has been maintained the past few years of trumped-up fury over entertainment. Weve all watched on wearily as pop culture became the default battleground for the current force of right-wing, anti-inclusivity fearmongering that opened the doors to a rabbit hole of radicalization. Films, TV shows, music, and so on have always inspired a certain sort of fervency, a deeply emotional investment encouraged by marketing. Im not sure weve ever had a time when such things havent led to well-crafted hysteria. Consider the Satanic Panic over the 80s targeting horror movies and rock music, or the Catholic League picketing Hollywood way back in its infancy. For as long as art has existed, someone has tried to ban it. Our current era isnt new, but it does feel more immediate, tied to the rising anti-queer and racist tide that has permeated political power on both sides of the pond.

Its easy to get people wound up over pop culture. It seems so low-stakes yet enticingly comforting in its ability to comfort and inspire us. Were hardwired to defend the things we love, taught to believe that they are extensions of our very selves. Ive witnessed more than my fair share of fandom wars to know how messy this mindset can get, and Im not immune to it myself. Nobody is. That seemingly minor sensation is scarily easy to wield as a weapon. When youve been trained from birth to view certain corporate entities and their highly profitable IPs as your childhood, breaking away from that idea is often easier said than done, especially if youre used to being exclusively pandered to by these brands. Remember the fallout from 2016s Ghostbusters reboot and how quickly that perfectly fine film was swarmed by misogynists and racists and their fake fury? That bigotry became impossible to ignore because it was amplified by the same shameless careerists who had turned hating Anita Sarkeesian into their full-time job. They saw an opportunity and they took it, and plenty of creeps latched onto them to give their movement the vaguest sheen of legitimacy.

The pattern is obvious once you notice it: take a pop-culture property with at least some mainstream appeal, latch onto a minor detail involving diversity, shout about how its yet another example of the vague concept of wokeness or cancel culture, and tag in a few bigots or Elon Musk for extra promo. Make sure to use a lot of words like erasure of whiteness or heterosexuality, and big up the frequently refuted delusion that Hollywood is an uber-liberal paradise that forces poor oppressed racists to censor themselves. Maybe throw in some incendiary claims about child grooming and critical race theory to seal the deal and guarantee some QAnon support. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I saw a Daily Mail headline recently because of course it was them that claimed British builders were going WOKE (their capitalization) because many tradesmen were now discussing their feelings with colleagues and shunning greasy fried breakfasts. We know that the appropriation of woke to now mean anything vaguely diverse was always a dog-whistle sham, but seeing it applied in such an evidently ridiculous context only emphasizes that. Woke and cancel culture and culture war are meaningless terms, barely legitimate covers for wannabe provocateurs who are mad that they cant say the N word on stage. When even eating well and being open with colleagues is positioned as something damning, you have to wonder what kind of future these people want for us.

As with all culture wars, the goalposts are always moving. The targets change, sometimes flipping from fine to abhorrent for no other reason than its convenient to do so. The smallest of details are elevated to criminal status, and the targets are predictably marginalized voices and individuals. A half-second gay kiss is wokeness going too far. A Black woman in a story about space wizards with laser swords is unthinkably evil. A female protagonist of any kind elicits abject fury. Theres no reason behind this hate, not that reason would justify it. The aim is to destroy progress in all its forms. If that werent the case then we wouldnt see the likes of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and the chucklefuck GOP congressmen of the week latching onto these moments with practiced zeal.

They dont want to see queer people existing. They dont want to see people of color existing. They dont want to see trans kids living. They dont want to see toxic masculinity be challenged in any shape, way, or form. When the most audience tested, watered down and corporate mandated forms of entertainment we all consume reflect even the tiniest signs of progress, its seen as going too far and must be stomped out of life immediately. It may not seem like much to many at first because hey, its just a movie, right? Its no big deal. But we all know the road its leading towards. Thats why I felt the need to write this piece, to note how blatantly flimsy the theatrics are when they fail, yet remain so potent when theres a real force behind them. Calling it out isnt easy when the other side reject reason and exist only to hate, but it still feels worthy. This wont stop anytime soon, especially as conservative politicians target trans kids, book banning has come back in style, and Black educators are stalked over ludicrous fears of critical race theory. These are the punching bags that rile up the most violent people in our society, all of whom are buoyed by a media landscape that wont condemn the rising ride of fascism. Pop culture is but one of their chosen battlegrounds. It may fail once or twice but its success rate is shockingly high, and that should worry us.

Kayleigh is a features writer and editor for Pajiba. You can follow her on Twitter or listen to her podcast, The Hollywood Read.

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'Lightyear,' 'The Boys,' and How to Start a Fake Culture War - Pajiba Entertainment News

Talk about abortion is dominating the US culture wars, again. A leaked US Supreme Court majority opinion foreshadows the overturning of 1973s Roe vs. Wade decision protecting a womans liberty to terminate a pregnancy without excessive government restriction, sparking joy among anti-abortion campaigners and dread among choice advocates. Anyone naive to the last 50 years of abortion politics might think the sides are concerned with two entirely different phenomena. One advocates a womans right to reproductive and bodily autonomy, whereas the other condemns what it considers to be a form of homicide.

Many self-declared pro-lifers consider the termination of a pregnancy the moral equivalent of taking a newborn life. Their strategies, including the endless debates over when a fetus becomes viable, seek to blur distinctions between aborting a fetus and killing a newborn child. So much so that few on the pro-choice side welcome discussion about the relationship between abortion and infanticide. I argue here that an understanding of that relationshipdrawing on evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolutionleads to the conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.

Infanticide

According to infanticide researchers Susan Hatters Friedman and Phillip J. Reznick, the day during which a person is at greatest risk of homicide is the first day of life. Neonaticide, the killing of infants soon after birth, might sound like a rare crime committed by the occasional deranged adult, but the reality is more disturbing. In every society, contemporary and historic, for which adequate accounts exist, infants have been killed or abandoned to die. And not just the occasional infant here or there. By some estimates, as many as 10 to 15 percent of newborns throughout history have been killed.

Before the 1970s, scholars usually explained high historic levels of infanticide as somehow serving societies. They posited that the Carthaginian enthusiasm for child sacrifice, Platos eugenic advice that inferior Athenian parents expose their newborns to the elements, and countless other examples somehow aided social cohesion. And yet humanitys high levels of neonaticide and infant abandonment long predates the philosophic and religious beliefs that provided cultural cover for infanticide. It long precedes the invention of those religions that now condemn abortion and even the rise of those societies that invented the philosophies and religions. The ancient capacity for infanticide needs a proper explanation that begins with the motives of those individuals who kill or abandon their young.

The individual motives that lead to infanticide come into view when we recognise that the newborns own mother is responsible for nearly all neonaticides (killings of infants in the first 72 hours after birth). This is not a peculiarity of human mothering. Mothers of many mammalian species kill or abandonto certain deathsome newborns.

Understanding lion infanticide - Africa Geographic

Lion infanticide: A look into why lions sometimes kill the offspring of their own species.

Infanticide is the kind of behaviour one might expect natural selection to weed out. To understand why it sometimes does the opposite, it is worth a short field trip to the great plains of North America, where rabbit-sized rodents called black-tailed prairie dogs live in vast networks of communal burrows. Mothers invest a lot in their pups, producing nutritious milk and energetically defending them against predators and other breeding females. Between conceiving and bearing a litter, a mothers prospects for holding her own against other females can dwindle, reducing the chance she will see her pups safely through to independence. When this happens, some mothers cut their losses at birth, abandoning the pups to be consumed by others.

The mothers decision to cut her losses with pups that probably wont survive to maturity is economically rational, although it entails neither consciousness nor deliberation. When animal mothers kill or abandon their newborn young, they do so because their current circumstances are so poor that rearing those young will not be worthwhile. They can then immediately start feeding and get a chance to breed again under better conditions. Abandoning a litter in this way can eventually deliver the female more offspring, grand-offspring, great-grand-offspring, and so on, than she would have had by persisting with the original litter.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, more than any other researcher, built the modern evolutionary understanding of motherhood. Her exceptional book Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection strips away the idea of the boundlessly loving and caring mother, endowed by evolution with instincts to selflessly serve and protect her young. Hrdy builds a nuanced view of mothers as adaptive multi-taskers, balancing their investments in current offspring against their likely future relationships, reproductive opportunities, and social status. That has long included abandonment, neglect, or infanticide when it suited a mothers evolutionary interests.

Societies that hunt and gather their food provide some insight into what life was probably like for our ancestors throughout prehistory. Anthropological accounts show that more than 90 percent of infanticides in those societies occur either because difficulties in birth or development give the infant little chance of flourishing, or because the mother hasnt the support she needs to raise another child. The same logic underpins the custom in many traditional societies of killing one, or both, newborn twins if the mother and her helpers cannot give them both a good start in life.

Infanticide cases in 1970s and 1980s Canada fit a similar pattern. Even though young mothers made up only 14 percent of new mothers, they represented 45 percent of the mothers who killed their infants. And while unmarried mothers represented only 13 percent of all new mothers, they committed 60 percent of infanticides. Worldwide, mothers who commit neonaticide tend to be free of psychiatric disorders, young, and unmarried. What distinguishes these mothers is a lack of experience, means, and support, making a birth far from welcome.

Evolutionary theory neatly predicts the observed relationship between maternal age and infanticide. Young mothers, with most of their reproductive future ahead of them, might sometimes be better off by deferring motherhood until they have the support and resources they need to adequately care for and invest in a child. Older mothers, however, will have fewer chances to conceive again, and losing out on the chance to rear the current child will represent a bigger cost to the lifetime fitness of an older mother.

Alternatives to infanticide

Throughout human evolution, infanticide has been the last resort of mothers in untenable or deteriorating circumstances. History confirms that mothers will grasp at any more palatable alternatives, including abandoning an infant in the hope that someone else might raise it. As many as 20 to 40 percent of children born in Rome in the first 300 years of the common era may have been abandoned or exposed in public places. There, they might have been claimed by another family and either adopted or enslaved. Those who were not quickly adopted usually died.

From a distance of two millennia, one could look at ancient Roman exposure as an unfathomable dimension of a harsh culture. But infant exposure raised the same moral dilemmas, elicited similar shames and disapproval, and inflicted on parents the same anguish and grief that it might today. Infants selected for exposure were either unhealthy and unlikely to thrive or from families who could not afford to raise another child.

Despite changing public opinion and stronger preventative laws after the Romans adopted Christianity, abandonment remained widespread for centuries, particularly when economic conditions deteriorated. Throughout the Middle Ages, so many newborns were abandoned that many European churches provided drop-off places for mothers to safely leave newborns. In more recent centuries, records kept by parishes, cities, and hospitals tell of millions of babies abandoned in European cities. From 1500 until the middle of the 19th century, for example, between 10 and 40 percent of all babies baptised in Florence were foundlings.

Once found, however, a high proportion of infants were more permanently lost. In some institutions, fewer than one percent survived their first year. Abandoning an infant might not be psychologically the same thing as killing it, but outcomes for the infant were almost identical. Like infanticide, abandonment was a symptom of maternal circumstances. Foundlings came overwhelmingly from mothers who were unmarried, widowed, extremely poor, or domestic servants. Mothers, that is, without the help and financial support of a husband or close relatives and for whom the demands of caring for an infant would not have been compatible with earning a wage or securing a long-term partner.

The circumstances under which mothers abandon their children match the circumstances that contribute to infanticide in traditional societies. Abandonment replaced infanticide in the societies of Europe and elsewhere. While less common in most contemporary societies than at any time in the last two millennia, abandonment still happens, especially when economic or social circumstances deteriorate. Fortunately for foundlings, the survival rate of those who are abandoned at birth is far greater now than it has ever been in the past.

Many shades of mother

Anti-abortion attitudes form part of a broader tension about mothering, polarising good mothers who go to any lengths to provide for their children from bad mothers who neglect or abandon their offspring. The reality, of course, is far more complicated. Sarah Hrdys comprehensive research reveals a continuum in investment between these extremes, with most negotiating the middle ground.

This view places infanticide and abandonment in the context of maternal investment, and like any kind of investment, mothering comes at a cost. Mothers with neither reliable partner nor other support, for example, are less inclined to breastfeed. In impoverished communities with poor sanitation, this can imperil the baby as formula made up with drinking water becomes a recipe for diarrhoea and, often, death. But mothers with a partner who earns a living, or with other familial support, are more likely to breastfeed, making early infant survival less of a lottery. Sometimes, the same women who bottle-fed and lost children to diarrhoea earlier in life choose to breastfeed and form a much closer attachment to subsequent infants when their circumstances improve.

Evolution moulded human mothers into strategic investors, sensitive to each childs chances of thriving, and attuned to their own projected costs of breastfeeding, protecting, and caring for the child over the coming years. The story of strategic mothering is, in wealthy contemporary societies, a mostly happy one. More infants are born to mothers who can afford to invest in them than at any time in history, or in humanitys deep pre-historic past. And thats because women have better, safer ways of ensuring they dont bear offspring they cant afford to invest in. One of those ways is safe, legal abortion.

Abortion is the same thing

Abortion isnt a modern invention. Botanical abortifacients of variable efficacy were available in many ancient societies. Women in many traditional societies also have ways of aborting a pregnancy. But they are so unsafe that mothers more often find neonaticide a better option. As Hrdy puts it:

Safe abortion, then, is the modern cure for the ancient heartbreaks of neonaticide and abandonment. The circumstances that predict abortion rates in contemporary societies are the same as those that led mothers to abandon, neglect, or kill their newborn infants throughout history and deep into humanitys evolutionary past.

Centers for Disease Control and Preventions reporting on legal abortion in the USA reveals that, by far, the highest ratio of aborted pregnancies to live births (the abortion ratio) occurs in teenagers. In 2019, the abortion ratio was 873 per 1,000 live births among those younger than 15 and 348 per 1,000 in those 15 to 19. This number declines steadily until the 3034 age group in which only 132 pregnancies were terminated for every 1,000 live births.

Few 13-year-olds, their whole adult lives ahead of them, wish to become mothers. Girls that young seldom get pregnant in hunter-gatherer societies, where food is hard to come by and it takes longer to accumulate enough body fat to become fertile. Most young teens are psychologically unready to become mothers, and societies now recognise this in age-of-consent laws.

Parental and legal concerns may make termination of pregnancies in children younger than 15 somewhat more acceptable, but that only complements the evolutionary logic that the youngest women have the most to lose from becoming mothers. And the offspring of those that do become mothers suffer far poorer prospects, on average, than the offspring of older mothers, especially those who are in stable relationships or are financially independent.

Just as unmarried mothers are more likely than married mothers to commit infanticide or abandon their offspring, they are also almost nine times more likely to terminate a pregnancy (394 abortions per 1,000 live births) than married women (46 abortions per 1,000 live births). That observation reflects that a single woman is less likely than a partnered woman to have the financial, emotional, and practical support she needs to raise a child.

Before we can talk about abortion law with any degree of sincerity, we need to face the uncomfortable truth that, in all societies, past and present, many pregnancies were, and are, unintended and unwanted. In the USA, almost half of all pregnancies are unintended at the time of conception. In the developing world, mothers who do not want to get pregnant conceive an estimated one-third of all pregnancies, amounting to 75 million unwanted pregnancies each year.

Most unintended pregnancies constitute a calamity, at least for the mother. Especially if she is very young, poor, isolated, in an abusive relationship, or if she already has as many children as she can care for. The best scientific studies of the consequences of being able or unable to obtain an abortion bear this out. Women denied an abortion end up significantly poorer, in worse health, and more likely to be in an abusive relationship than an otherwise identical sample of women who were able to terminate their unwanted pregnancy. Their other children also experienced worse physical, psychological, and relationship development.

In the past, when induced abortions were all illegal, unsafe, and hard to arrange, a much higher proportion of unwanted pregnancies resulted in the infants death soon after birth. The availability of safe, legal abortion has prevented many of those deaths. In the USA, for example, neonatal deaths plummeted in the early 1970s as a direct result of the protected abortion rights flowing from Roe vs. Wade.

The availability of abortion also reduces infant abandonment. In Romania, the communist regime of dictator Nicolae Ceauescu strenuously opposed abortion and family planning. As a result of this ban, Romanians abandoned a remarkable proportion of children to be raised in institutions. The State wanted them, the State should raise them became the refrain as families abandoned newborns in maternity wards, hospitals, or dedicated institutions. When Ceauescu fell in 1989, the lifting of the abortion ban caused rates of infant abandonment to plunge.

Anti-abortion campaigners overlook the crucial fact that safe and legal abortion provides far and away the most successful solution to the longstanding historic problems of neonaticide, infant abandonment, and neglect. If they are not available legally, women will seek illegal abortions, which are far less safe. Each year, an estimated 68,000 women and girls die and seven million women are treated for complications, many suffering permanent disability, due to illegal abortions.

Controlling sex

The bad news for anti-abortionists is that abortion presents effective society-level prevention for infanticide, infant abandonment, and neglect. But theres plenty of good news for those genuinely committed to reducing the number of terminated pregnancies. A similar cure exists for abortion. Ample scientific evidence shows that unwanted pregnancies can be prevented via evidence-based sex education and access to reliable contraception.

The Contraceptive CHOICE Project in St Louis, Missouri, illustrates how effectively reliable contraception can prevent unwanted pregnancies and reduce abortions. The project recruited 9,256 sexually active women who expressed a wish for reversible contraception. Women received counselling that covered all reversible methods but emphasised that long-acting reversible contraceptives (intrauterine devices and implants) were more effective than methods like the pill or the contraceptive patch. Participants then received their chosen contraceptive at no cost. Follow-up interviews over two to three years then established if each woman had become pregnant or had had an abortion.

Participants in the CHOICE project were dramatically less likely to become pregnant than women of the same demographic makeup in the same region of the USA. There were fewer than one-fifth as many teen births. Abortion rates halved. And by reaching nearly 10,000 at-risk women in a city of over 1.3 million, abortions in the entire city of St Louis dropped by 20 percent. By comparison, abortion rates in demographically similar Kansas City remained stable.

CHOICE is estimated to have prevented 6,794 abortions over three years. Evidence-based and ethical counselling emphasising reliable methods of contraception, together with free reversible contraception of a womans chosen type, represents the most effective known way to reduce abortions. Anti-abortion activists should be heralding this study from every Sunday and social media pulpit they command.

And yet, when New York Times journalist Emily Bazelon asked Charmaine Yoest, the peppy then-president of Americans United for Life, about the CHOICE project, Yoest said, I dont want to frustrate you, but Im not going to go there. Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.

Instead of finding common ground with family planning advocates over a phenomenal intervention that is scientifically shown to reduce unplanned pregnancies and terminations, Yoest and other anti-abortion leaders chose to fuss about the framing of the issue and to reinforce the partisan side-taking that so contaminates this issue. If preventing abortions compels such an urgent moral priority for anti-abortion campaigners, why dont they mobilise their formidable energies to raise funds for family planning and contraception services? Is the American pro-life movements obsession with slashing support for Planned Parenthood really only about abortion, or could it have something to do with the other services they provide? Like contraception?

The only consistent answer to these questions is that what disturbs most anti-abortion campaigners is not abortion itself, but the sex that causes unwanted pregnancy. That makes the abortion issue and the starring role of sex in the culture wars a far more difficult tangle to untie.

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The Tragedy of the Unwanted Child: What Ancient Cultures Did Before Abortion - Quillette

As with so many aspects of the culture wars, the American debate over abortion seems to spend little time considering what policies will actually do to the people at whom theyre aimed.

Proponents of restrictions or outright bans believe theyre fighting to save unborn lives. But while the question of when an unborn fetus becomes a person is more a question of faith than science, those restrictions can have profound impacts on many who are undeniably people.

Of course, the people who will be most profoundly affected will be women and families who dont or barely have the money to leave the state for an abortion in the likely event that Ohio severely restricts or bans the procedure after Roe v Wade is overturned.

So it seems important to see what data can say about who these women are and what restricting their ability to end unwanted pregnancies means for Ohio and the rest of the country.

Each year, the Ohio Department of health compiles abortion statistics in the state, giving a partial picture of who is getting them.

One striking fact is how many fewer women from all backgrounds are terminating their pregnancies. The number has plummeted from just under 45,000 in 1977, the first year for which the state published the statistics, to around 20,000 in 2020, the most recent year for which numbers are available.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest group of women who got Ohio abortions in 2020 were in their 20s 59% followed by women in their 30s, 29%. Also unsurprising is that 62% of women got abortions before they were nine weeks pregnant, while less than 2% got them after 19 weeks of pregnancy.

And, while its not surprising that unmarried women are more likely to get abortions, in 2020 they were much more so. The Ohio health stats indicated that 82% of the 20,605 women who received abortions in the state were never married, separated, divorced, or widowed.

But what is perhaps most striking among the Ohio statistics is how overrepresented Black women were.

Ohio is only 13% Black, but Black women received 48% of all abortions in in 2020, the largest single group. Whites, by contrast, make up 82% of the states population, but white women made up only 44% of the group receiving abortions.

The fact that so many unmarried and Black women were having abortions might suggest they didnt believe they have the emotional and financial support they needed to raise a child often in addition to children they already have. Also, more than 27% of Ohios Black people were living in poverty in 2020, compared to just 10% of white people.

However, there is evidence that at least nationally, the poorest women are less likely to seek abortions than their more affluent peers.

A 2015 study by the Brookings Institution found that while women living below the poverty line were much less likely to use contraception and more likely to become unintentionally pregnant, those who did were less likely to get abortions.

Between 2011 and 2013, 32% of women making four times the federal poverty level who had become unintentionally pregnant got abortions, the study said. That compares to less than 9% of women living below the poverty line during the same period.

Cost might be something keeping the poorest women away from the abortion clinic.

Planned Parenthood reports that its lowest-cost, early-pregnancy procedure in Ohio costs $650. If so, further restrictions seem likely to force up the cost particularly if they force women to travel out of state for the procedure.

It seems important with the U.S. Supreme Court apparently poised to overturn the 1973 decision to look at the consequences it might have for women who wont be able to get abortions and for society generally.

One paper published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research attempted to do that.

In it, two economists and a demographer used credit data to build on the 2016 Turnaway Study, which followed 1,000 women who had sought abortions at 30 clinics across the country. Through follow-up interviews, that study sought to compare women who were turned away from abortions to those who received them.

In the follow-up analysis, The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion, the research team compared credit information between women who were denied abortions due to gestational limits in states to those of women who received abortions, but were within two weeks of those limits. It sought to look at financial stress caused not only not only from the costs of having and raising a child, but also from a well-documented large and persistent decline in earnings (i.e. child penalty) that women experience on average following the birth of a child.

The three researchers detected a lot of financial stress.

We find that abortion denial resulted in increases in the amount of debt 30 days or more past due of $1,750, an increase of 78% relative to their pre-birth mean, and in negative public records on the credit report such as bankruptcy, evictions, and tax liens, of about 0.07 additional records, or an increase of 81%, the paper said.

It added, These effects are persistent over time, with elevated rates of financial distress observed the year of the birth and for the entire 5 subsequent years for which we observe the women. Our point estimates also suggest that being denied an abortion may reduce credit access and self-sufficiency, particularly in the years immediately following the birth, although these estimates are not always statistically significant.

Of course, worse economic outcomes for those mothers and their babies dont just affect them. They also affect any other children and family members the woman is caring for.

Being forced to carry a child to term might also increase the chances that a child is unwanted and that can cause bad societal outcomes, such as an increase in crime.

In 2001, economists John J. Donohue III and Steven Levitt published The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It tried to explain the precipitous drop in crime through the 1990s from all-time highs in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

After ruling out other theories for the drop, it concluded that the 1973 legalization of abortion resulted in many fewer unwanted children and, as that cohort came of age, a lot less crime.

Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50% of the recent drop in crime, it said.

The paper stirred a ferocious response across the political spectrum. Some, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, compared it to the pseudo-science of eugenics, which advocated sterilization of people with traits deemed undesirable.

In a 2019 podcast, Levitt said subsequent research reinforced their earlier work. He also denied that his and Donohues research advocated forcing anybody to do anything.

I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics, Levitt said. In our hypothesis what happens is abortion becomes legal, women are given the right to choose and what our data suggest is that women are pretty good at choosing when they can bring kids into the world; when they can provide good environments for them.

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Beyond the rhetoric: Abortion restrictions will affect poor & minorities unequally - Ohio Capital Journal