Culture: January 2008 Archives

Townhall.com: Steve Chapman: The Growing Aversion to Abortion

Progress on the hearts and minds front: "In 2003, Gallup found, one of every three kids from age 13 to 17 said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. More revealing yet is that 72 percent said abortion is 'morally wrong.'... The report on abortion rates from the Guttmacher Institute suggests that the evolution of attitudes has transformed behavior. Since 1990, the number of abortions has dropped from 1.61 million to 1.21 million. The abortion rate among women of childbearing age has declined by 29 percent.... In 1990, 30.4 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion. Last year, the figure was 22.4 percent."

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher: Culture, character, and poverty

A must-read: "This is a sore point with me. What middle-class liberals see as 'liberation' from an oppressive code of sexual behavior amounts to a kind of enslavement of the poor. Middle-class people have greater means, materially and otherwise, to deal with the consequences of their promiscuity, and over time the abandonment of bourgeois values of self-restraint in favor of anarchic underclass values will impoverish the descendants of those who left those values behind. Don't get me wrong, it's still destructive of their soul and character, but for various reasons, the material consequences are mitigated. Not so for the poor, not usually."