Reproductivity
The GOP's Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s
Daniel Williams
Journal of Policy History, Winter 2011, Pages 513-539
"When the Republican national convention convened in Kansas City in 1976, the party's pro-choice majority did not expect a significant challenge to their views on abortion. Public opinion polls showed that Republican voters were, on average, more pro-choice than their Democratic counterparts, a view that the convention delegates shared; fewer than 40 percent of the delegates considered themselves pro-life. The chair of the Republican National Committee, Mary Louise Smith, supported abortion rights, as did First Lady Betty Ford, who declared Roe v. Wade a 'great, great decision.' Likewise, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who had taken a leading role in the fight for abortion rights in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was solidly pro-choice. Even some of the party's conservatives, such as Senator Barry Goldwater, supported abortion rights. But in spite of the Republican Party's pro-choice leadership, the GOP adopted a platform in 1976 that promised an antiabortion constitutional amendment. The party's leadership viewed the measure as a temporary political ploy that would increase the GOP's appeal among traditionally Democratic Catholics, but the platform statement instead became a rallying cry for social conservatives who used the plank to build a religiously based coalition in the GOP and drive out many of the pro-choice Republicans who had initially adopted the platform...In 1940, the GOP became the first major party to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. Republicans in state legislatures also led the fight against Catholic clergy to expand the public availability of contraceptives. Planned Parenthood's Republican supporters included Senator Prescott Bush (R-Conn.) and his son, George H. W. Bush; Senator Barry Goldwater's wife, Peggy Goldwater, who founded an Arizona chapter of the organization; and President Dwight Eisenhower, who served as the organization's honorary co-chair in the 1960s...In early 1967, Reagan, at the urging of Republican legislators, signed into law a bill that gave women the right to an abortion when their physical or mental health was in danger. That same year, Colorado's Republican governor signed into law the nation's first abortion liberalization bill, which a Republican-dominated legislature had passed by a 2-1 margin...Democrats in some states were also willing to vote for abortion liberalization, but only if they did not have to worry about a backlash from Catholic voters. In North Carolina, a predominantly Baptist state where Catholics made up only 1 percent of the population, the Democratic state legislature approved an abortion liberalization measure by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate in 1967...Republicans shifted their position on abortion only after they decided to bid for Catholic votes. Republicans were a minority party in the 1960s and 1970s, but strategists associated with Richard Nixon believed that if the GOP could find a way to appeal to Catholics, the party could improve its electoral prospects...Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority, which Nixon politicos treated as a campaign bible as soon as it appeared in 1969, argued that social issues were producing a political realignment that would benefit Republicans, and that the GOP could begin winning national elections if it found a way to carry the 'heartland' of the industrial Midwest, including the heavily Catholic regions of Michigan and northern Illinois. After Phillips's book was published, Harry Dent, who handled Nixon's campaign operations below the Mason-Dixon line and was widely viewed as the architect of the president's 'southern strategy,' told the president that Midwestern Catholics would be just as vital as southerners in the president's reelection calculations. He urged Nixon to find a way to bring conservative Catholics 'into the Republican camp by a moderately conservative policy.' Nixon had received only 33 percent of the Catholic vote in 1968, but he resolved to increase his support among that constituency by developing a 'Catholic strategy' during his first year in office. At first, Nixon resisted the idea of making abortion policy part of his 'Catholic strategy,' because he believed that a shift to the right on the issue would alienate some of his traditional Republican supporters. During his first year in office, he defied the Catholic clergy by expanding the federal government's family-planning initiatives, declaring that 'no American woman should be denied access to family planning services because of her economic condition.' He also appointed John D. Rockefeller III, a leading proponent of contraceptive distribution, as head of the Commission on Population Growth...[O]nly a few days after Muskie introduced the issue of abortion into the campaign, Nixon issued his own statement on the subject in order to eliminate any advantage that the Democratic candidate might have gained with conservative Catholics. Picking up on the senator's use of the phrase 'sanctity of human life,' Nixon said that he, too, believed in the 'sanctity of human life - including the life of the yet unborn.'...In early April 1971, Nixon also issued a new policy requiring military hospitals to conform to state abortion laws, which would reduce the availability of abortion on many military bases. Only eight months earlier, Nixon had raised no objection when his Defense Department created a policy that would increase the availability of legal abortion for military personnel and their spouses, but after Muskie's speech he felt the need to secure his administration from potential criticism on the issue from socially conservative Catholics, so he overturned his Defense Department's directive...In May 1972, Nixon took the unprecedented step of intervening in a state's legislative debate on abortion. He chose New York as his battleground, which was politically problematic because the most prominent defender of the state's liberal abortion law - and the one who was leading the fight to block its repeal - was Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was also managing the president's reelection campaign in the state...That same week, Nixon repudiated a recommendation for abortion law liberalization that came from his own Commission on Population Growth. When Nixon had set up the commission in 1970, population control had not been particularly controversial in Republican Party circles, but as Nixon prepared for a reelection campaign in which he thought he would need the support of socially conservative Catholics, he did not want to associate himself with the contentious policy recommendations of the commission. During the two years in which the commission had met, Nixon had moved to the right on abortion, and the commission recognized the president's new stance on the issue by emphasizing in its report that women should not rely on abortion as their primary means of birth control. But the commission's cautious language on the subject was not enough for Nixon, who insisted that the panel's recommendation for 'unrestricted abortion policies would demean human life.' Nixon's conservative overtures on abortion in the spring of 1972 may have been a reaction to Democratic presidential contender Hubert Humphrey's use of the issue to win Catholic votes, just as the president's shift to the right on abortion the previous year had come in response to Muskie's statements...Yet even if the White House viewed abortion primarily as a 'Catholic issue,' there were also signs that it had broader appeal among a larger contingent of social conservatives who perhaps had been amenable to abortion law liberalization at one time, but who were turning against the idea because of their opposition to feminism and the sexual revolution...Yet Nixon could not swing too far to the right on abortion without losing support from abortion rights advocates in his party. Rita Hauser, the vice-chair of the Committee to Reelect the President, was a supporter of abortion rights, as were many of the women who served as delegates to the Republican National Convention. Jill Ruckelshaus, whose husband headed the Environmental Protection Agency, led a Republican women's campaign to get the Platform Committee to endorse the liberalization of state abortion laws, arguing that after McGovern's 'betrayal' of his core constituency on abortion, the Republican Party could pick up votes from disillusioned feminist Democrats by endorsing abortion rights...Nixon became the first Republican presidential candidate in American history to win a majority of the Catholic vote, even though his opponent had chosen a Catholic running mate...Compared to the public outcry that had greeted the Court's landmark decisions on school desegregation in 1954 and school prayer in 1962, the initial opposition to Roe seemed weak. While politicians ignored the issue, religious activists at the grassroots level galvanized a national pro-life movement that largely escaped the attention of the national media...Christianity Today, which had published some articles in the late 1960s suggesting that abortion for health-related reasons was acceptable, abandoned its earlier position and denounced Roe as a sign that the 'American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God.' Although most politicians did not realize the depth of anger against Roe in Catholic and evangelical circles, one astute senator who did was Bob Dole (R-Kans.), who was facing a tough reelection fight against medical doctor William Roy in the fall of 1974. In the immediate aftermath of Watergate and President Gerald Ford's pardon of his predecessor, Republican incumbents faced almost insurmountable odds in their reelection bids, even in Dole's conservative Kansas. Dole was behind in the polls until his campaign team ran advertisements pointing out that his opponent had performed abortions in his medical practice and that Dole, in contrast, supported an antiabortion constitutional amendment. After some of his supporters blanketed Catholic church parking lots with attacks on Roy's abortion record, Dole won reelection by a narrow victory...In 1972, Republican pro-choice women had taken their party's endorsement of the ERA for granted, and had felt free to mount a campaign for a platform plank endorsing abortion rights. But by 1976, after four years of Schlafly's grassroots campaign, Republican women recognized that the party had already begun to move to the cultural right and that they had no chance of persuading the party to adopt a pro-choice platform. In such a situation, they were willing to sacrifice their pro-choice position in order to save the party's endorsement of the ERA. Ford had his own reasons for silence; in the interest of promoting harmony at a convention in which Reagan was still a contender for the nomination, he wanted to defuse the abortion issue by adopting the platform committee's recommendations in order to avoid a contentious floor fight. If the promise of a pro-life constitutional amendment was necessary to appease some of Reagan's culturally conservative delegates, Ford was willing to pay that price...By the end of the Carter administration, rising abortion rates and concerns about sexual promiscuity prompted evangelical pastors and televangelists, such as Jerry Falwell, to begin speaking out on the issue and to create a national political coalition that made opposition to abortion a central theme...In 1996, when Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole suggested modifications in the party's platform statement on abortion to soften the position that he had helped to create twenty years earlier, Christian Right leaders and pro-life activists overruled the nominee's wishes and insisted that the party retain its support for a 'human life' amendment...The political strategists in the Nixon and Ford administrations who engineered a shift in the party's stance on abortion set in motion a process that reshaped the party in ways they had never envisioned."
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The political economy of fertility
Thorsten Janus
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the political economy of fertility. Specifically, I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy's ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.
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The Association of Television and Radio with Reproductive Behavior
Charles Westoff & Dawn Koffman
Population and Development Review, December 2011, Pages 749-759
Abstract:
This note analyzes the association between media exposure and reproductive behavior in 48 developing countries. A summary of part of a more extensive Demographic and Health Surveys report, it shows strong connections between media exposure and the use of modern contraception, the number of children desired, and recent fertility. Television viewing is particularly important; it is assumed to expose viewers to aspects of modern life that compete with traditional attitudes toward the family and is associated with greater use of modern contraceptive methods, with a desire for fewer children, and with lower fertility. These relationships are particularly noteworthy because the data measure only the frequency of media exposure with no information about its content.
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Too Many Men? Sex Ratios and Women's Partnering Behavior in China
Katherine Trent & Scott South
Social Forces, September 2011, Pages 247-267
Abstract:
The relative numbers of women and men are changing dramatically in China, but the consequences of these imbalanced sex ratios have received little empirical attention. We merge data from the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey with community-level data from Chinese censuses to examine the relationship between cohort- and community-specific sex ratios and women's partnering behavior. Consistent with demographic-opportunity theory and sociocultural theory, we find that high sex ratios (indicating more men relative to women) are associated with an increased likelihood that women marry before age 25. However, high sex ratios are also associated with an increased likelihood that women engage in premarital and extramarital sexual relationships and have more than one sexual partner, findings consistent with demographic-opportunity theory but inconsistent with sociocultural theory.
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Getting Past Nature as a Guide to the Human Sex Ratio
Timothy Murphy
Bioethics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sex selection of children by pre-conception and post-conception techniques remains morally controversial and even illegal in some jurisdictions. Among other things, some critics fear that sex selection will distort the sex ratio, making opposite-sex relationships more difficult to secure, while other critics worry that sex selection will tilt some nations toward military aggression. The human sex ratio varies depending on how one estimates it; there is certainly no one-to-one correspondence between males and females either at birth or across the human lifespan. Complications about who qualifies as ‘male' and ‘female' complicate judgments about the ratio even further. Even a judiciously estimated sex ratio does not have, however, the kind of normative status that requires society to refrain from antenatal sex selection. Some societies exhibit lopsided sex ratios as a consequence of social policies and practices, and pragmatic estimates of social needs are a better guide to what the sex ratio should be, as against looking to ‘nature'. The natural sex ratio cannot be a sound moral basis for prohibiting parents from selecting the sex of their children, since it ultimately lacks any normative meaning for social choices.
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M.T. Higginson & L.W. Aarssen
The Open Anthropology Journal, November 2011, Pages 60-65
Abstract:
In most developed countries, gender equality and neutrality have been widely promoted and embraced - through public policy - as a socio-cultural goal since at least the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, we predicted that a population of highly educated youth from a relatively wealthy developed country (mostly students from a Canadian university) would display little or no significant gender bias with respect to offspring preferences. We rejected this hypothesis based on data collected in an online survey from over 2000 respondents. Participants were asked whether they had any preference regarding: (i) the gender of their firstborn child; (ii) the gender ratio of their offspring; or (iii) the gender of an only child. In all cases, there was a significant offspring gender preference, but the direction of bias depended on the respondent's gender; males significantly preferred sons whereas females significantly preferred daughters. These data show that strong gender biases in offspring preferences are still conspicuous, even within segments of modern societies where we might least expect to find them. We offer interpretations of these results in the context of evolutionary theory - as products of selection for genetic
(biological) and memetic (cultural) legacy.
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Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat & Daniel Hungerman
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper considers how the diffusion of oral contraception to young unmarried women affected the number and parental characteristics of children born to these women. In the short term, pill access caused declines in fertility and increases in both the share of children born with low birthweight and the share born to poor households. In the long term, access led to negligible changes in fertility while increasing the share of children with college-educated mothers and decreasing the share with divorced mothers. The short-term effects appear to be driven by upwardly mobile women opting out of early childbearing, while the long-term effects appear to be driven by a retiming of births to later ages. These effects differ from those of abortion legalization, although we find suggestive evidence that pill diffusion lowered abortions. Our results suggest that abortion and the pill are on average used for different purposes by different women, but on the margin, some women substitute from abortion toward the pill when both are available.
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Does welfare reform affect fertility? Evidence from the UK
Mike Brewer, Anita Ratcliffe & Sarah Smith
Journal of Population Economics, December 2011, Pages 245-266
Abstract:
This paper provides evidence on the effect of welfare reform on fertility, focusing on UK reforms in 1999 that increased per-child spending by 50% in real terms. We use a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the fact that the reforms were targeted at low-income households. The reforms were likely to differentially affect the fertility of women in couples and single women because of the opportunity cost effects of the welfare-to-work element. We find no increase in births among single women, but evidence to support an increase in births (by around 15%) among coupled women.
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Fasting During Pregnancy and Children's Academic Performance
Douglas Almond, Bhashkar Mazumder & Reyn van Ewijk
NBER Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are .05 to .08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to the extent that Ramadan is not universally observed. We conclude that the effects of prenatal investments on test scores are comparable to many conventional educational interventions but are likely to be more cost effective and less subject to "fade out".
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Armed conflict and birth weight: Evidence from the al-Aqsa Intifada
Hani Mansour & Daniel Rees
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
No previous study has estimated the effect of intrauterine exposure to armed conflict on pregnancy outcomes. Drawing on data from the 2004 Palestinian Demographic and Health Survey, which was conducted approximately four years after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, we find that an additional conflict-related fatality 9-6 months before birth is associated with a modest increase in the probability of having a child who weighed less than 2,500 grams. There is also evidence, albeit less consistent, of a positive relationship between fatalities in late pregnancy and low birth weight.
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Surrogate Motherhood Revisited: Maternal Identity from a Jewish Perspective
Alan Jotkowitz
Journal of Religion and Health, December 2011, Pages 835-840
Abstract:
A new bill regulating ovum donation in Israel is set to pass its second and third readings in the Israel Parliament in the upcoming months. The new law will expand the number of locally donated ova available, as previously Israeli women were prohibited from donating eggs unless they were undergoing fertility treatment. Parallel to this legislative initiative, there has been a change in rabbinical thinking over who is considered the mother in a case of surrogacy. Previously, the consensus has been that the birth mother is to be considered the mother, but over the last few years there has been a change in thinking and the genetic mother is now considered the mother. The purpose of this paper is to present the ethical and legal issues from a Jewish perspective in determining maternal identity. The dilemma also demonstrates some of the difficulties in applying Talmudic law to modern problems and the various methodologies used to overcome these issues.
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Michael Logan
Human Ecology, December 2011, Pages 727-742
Abstract:
Interethnic marriage represents a major trend in the demographic history of American Indians. While the majority of these unions involved Indian women and Caucasian men, a sizeable number occurred between Indians and African Americans. The children of these bicultural marriages were "mixed bloods" who in turn typically married non-Indians or other mixed bloods. Using data from the 1910 Census on American Indians in the United States and Alaska, this article explores why American Indians with African ancestry enjoyed high fertility. Differential rates of fertility among American Indians in the past were due to a number of underlying genetic, cultural, and environmental factors. By identifying these factors, the paradox of why Indian women with African heritage did so well in terms of fertility largely disappears. African admixture, however, greatly complicates Indian social identity.
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Jessica Todd, Paul Winters & Guy Stecklov
Journal of Population Economics, December 2011, Pages 267-290
Abstract:
Evaluating the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility is complicated given that changes in incentives to have children take time to be incorporated into decision making and evaluation periods are usually quite brief. We explore the use of birth spacing as a short-run indicator of the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility. The data come from a Nicaraguan conditional cash transfer program that offers incentives for poor households to invest in children's health, nutrition, and education. We estimate a stratified Cox proportional hazard model and find that the program decreased the hazard of a birth, indicating an increase in birth spacing.
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"I'm Not Supporting His Kids": Nonresident Fathers' Contributions Given Mothers' New Fertility
Daniel Meyer & Maria Cancian
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2012, Pages 132-151
Abstract:
The authors examined whether nonresident fathers provide informal support to their children and whether support stops if their ex-partner goes on to have a child with a new man. A logistic regression analysis of longitudinal survey and administrative data for 434 women who received welfare in Wisconsin showed that fathers are less likely to provide informal support when their ex-partner has a child with a new partner. Alternative models that control for unobserved characteristics suggest somewhat different results, providing stronger evidence of declines in support that can be shared across family members than in support that can be directed to a particular child.
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Sensation seeking in fathers: The impact on testosterone and paternal investment
Tiziana Perini et al.
Hormones and Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Paternal care is associated with a reduced likelihood of engaging in competitive or mating behavior and an increased likelihood of providing protection when necessary. Over recent years, there has been increasing evidence to assume that the steroid testosterone (T) in men might reflect the degree of mating effort. In line with this, decreased T levels were shown in fathers compared to non-fathers and it was suggested that paternal care, and most behavior positively associated with T, might be incompatible with each other. Independently of this, the personality trait sensation seeking (SS) has been related to mating behavior and also to elevated T in men. Aiming to integrate these different lines of research in a longitudinal approach, we explored the impact of SS on T levels in the context of the transition to fatherhood. Thirty-seven fathers and 38 men without children but in committed, romantic relationships (controls) were recruited. At two time points (for fathers: four weeks prior to (t1) and eight weeks after birth (t2)), all subjects repeatedly collected saliva samples for T measurement, filled in a protocol of activities during the course of these days and completed an online questionnaire. In line with our hypotheses, the results show significantly lower aggregated (AUC-T) T levels in fathers compared with non-fathers. Furthermore, moderation analyses revealed a significant interaction between group and SS at t2, with the lowest T levels in low SS fathers. These data suggest that adaptation processes of the transition to fatherhood are influenced by individual differences in personality traits.
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Lifestyles of the rich and polygynous in Cote d'Ivoire
Eric Gould, Omer Moav & Avi Simhon
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether the sources of income, not just the levels, determine whether an individual is monogamous. Our results support the idea that polygyny stunts development by allowing wealthy men to acquire wives rather than investing in child quality.
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The effects of teenage childbearing on the short- and long-term health behaviors of mothers
Jason Fletcher
Journal of Population Economics, December 2011, Pages 201-218
Abstract:
A national sample of US teenagers combined with a complementary sample of US adults are used to examine the effects of teenage childbearing on health behaviors by comparing female siblings in both the teenage sample and a sample of adults. Additionally, miscarriage information available in the teenage sample is used to form comparison groups. Unlike previous estimates of the effects of teenage childbearing on health behaviors, the results using these US samples and research designs suggest that teenage childbearing has negligible effects on several measures of unhealthy behaviors for mothers and may be protective for drug use and binge drinking.