The Extraordinary Lies Within The Curve Of Normality.
Science changes, as does the way scientists report on their work. Reading a 1971 article in Science, on attitudes towards induced abortion, I was truly amazed by the sheer amount of apparent activism that might have influenced the interpretation of the findings. Let’s have a look.
With the U.S. Presidential election campaigns gaining momentum, the important issues are becoming more and more clear. One such issue that might make or brake a candidate, is their stance on abortion. McCain and Palin strongly objecting against the possibility of women having an abortion, Obama and Biden take a pro-choice stance. More interestingly, though, Obama and Biden explicitly state on their site that it is their goal to protect the Roe vs. Wade ruling, whereas McCain-Palin explicitly state their goal to overrule Roe vs. Wade.
From a social science perspective, I think it is interesting to investigate these issues to a bit more depth, especially to see whether abortion has always been such a dividing line in American Politics.
Building upon the paper written by Jelen et al. (1993) that I wrote about a few days ago, I’d like to bring to your attention a more recent paper by Dutch researchers. It also addresses attitudes toward abortion in Western Europe, but does so in a rather more advanced manner.
As might be expected from an article written 15 years later, much developments have been made in the research on public opinion regarding induced abortion, both on a theoretical level, as well as on a methodological level. Let’s take a look at the outcomes of those improvements.
Even though it is rather widely known in sociology that individual actions can have unexpected or seemingly contradictory outcomes on the societal level, I always find it highly fascinating to read about such a seemingly paradoxical mechanism.
It has been a week since I started `Sociology Today‘. I’ve covered newspapers, free magazines found in public transportation, and blogs. All contained news that closely related to three main questions of sociology. It feels like this can indeed be …
