Quote:
Originally Posted by Scucca  Jelen and Wilcox (1997, Attitudes toward Abortion in Poland and the United States, Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 78, pp 907-921) offers an interesting cross-country comparison of catholic attitudes. Here's the abstract:
The article compares the distribution and correlates of mass attitudes towards legal abortion in Poland and the U.S. A telling comparison involves examining the abortion attitudes of Roman Catholics living in the U.S. It is observed that U.S. Catholics are slightly more likely to take an antiabortion position on the "traumatic" abortion items than are their Polish counterparts and considerably more likely to oppose abortion for "elective" reasons. This finding suggests that there is a slight tendency for the Catholic Church to be a more effective agent of political socialization in settings in which Catholicism is a minority religion. It is also found that Poles have come to be less accepting of the authoritative nature of church pronouncements and to regard issues of sexual morality as private and outside the church's legitimate jurisdiction. Lacking either obvious partners in an anti-abortion ecumenical coalition, or organized opposition in the form of feminist organizations, the Polish Catholic Church may be simply reiterating its authority to a population increasingly disinclined to accept its pronouncements as authoritative.
Can we use competition in religion as a means to explain the more aggressive anti-abortion attitudes typically found in the US? |
Yes, separation of church and state has encouraged religion in this country, and the basis of objection to legal abortion is primarily religious. (Now I expect to see numerous posts stating "but I'm not religious, my objection is moral, ethical, scientific, fill in the blank___.")
Abortion and Religion
'One of the things that sets America apart from many other nations is the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. For example, most European countries have state churches, and citizens must pay taxes to the church whether they attend or not. But in America, the separation of state and church has actually helped religion to grow and diversify. The United States today is one of the most religious countries in the world,...
The key to the origin of patriarchy probably lies in the biological need for people to invest in their own children. Evolutionarily speaking, individuals are compelled to spread their genes by reproducing. Animals do not generally take care of young that are not their own, since this would turn them into evolutionary dead-ends. In the case of humans, women always know that the children they bear are related to them, but men can never know for sure who their genetic offspring are, which can cause huge anxiety for them. This male dilemma matters little to women, since women’s biological priority is to find someone to help provide for their children, and it doesn’t have to be the father. In fact, female duplicity in this regard has always been common—overall, nine percent of children are raised by men who only think they are the fathers (Boster, 1997).
In ancient human societies, the obvious and most practical way to ensure that men invested in their own children was to dictate and restrict women’s sexual behaviour. For example, adultery became a far worse crime for women than for men. Of course, this control of women was never consciously justified on biological grounds—but it had to be justified somehow. The most convenient and effective social explanation was this: Women’s subjugation had to be enforced because women were inferior to men and their sexuality was a source of evil temptation that corrupted men.
How could such beliefs be justified and enforced? In a word, religion. Women’s confinement to the role of faithful wife and mother was God-ordained by default, because religion permeated early societies— it dictated everything about people’s lives. Divine laws and religious mythmaking fulfilled patriarchal needs by providing moral justification, strength, and endurance to beliefs about woman’s proper place. These beliefs became enshrined in the sacred books of organized religion, such as the Judaic Old Testament.
Woman's Place In the Christian Bedroom
Informed pro-choicers have always understood that the anti-abortion movement is not about saving babies—it's about putting women back in their place. And in fact, Biblical and religious attitudes towards women are the real key to anti-abortionism. The role and nature of women and their sexuality according to the anti-choice, explain the immorality of abortion."