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Thursday, July 21st, 2022

What really drives anti-abortion beliefs? Research suggests it’s a matter of sexual strategies

Author:     Jaimie Arona Krems and Martie Haselton
Source:     The Conversation
Publication Date:     July 19, 2022 | 8.25am EDT
 Link: What really drives anti-abortion beliefs? Research suggests it’s a matter of sexual strategies
Stephan:   It is not hard to understand why men want women to be submissive and subordinate. What is harder to understand is how Republican women can also support a legal position that by law makes women second class. Here is a fact-based take on this question.
There’s an interesting evolutionary benefit for some women if the consequences of casual sex are high. 
Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones / Pacific Press / Lightrocket / Getty

Many people have strong opinions about abortion – especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking a constitutional right previously held by more than 165 million Americans.

But what really drives people’s abortion attitudes?

It’s common to hear religious, political and other ideologically driven explanations – for example, about the sanctity of life. If such beliefs were really driving anti-abortion attitudes, though, then people who oppose abortion might not support the death penalty (many do), and they would support social safety net measures that could save newborns’ lives (many don’t).

Here, we suggest a different explanation for anti-abortion attitudes – one you probably haven’t considered before – from our field of evolutionary social science.

Why do people care what strangers do?

The evolutionary coin of the realm is fitness – getting more copies of your genes into the next generation. What faraway strangers do presumably has […]

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1 Comment

  1. S B on Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 10:27 am

    This logic is interesting yet flawed: it destructs when considering the “sexually restricted” punishing only women having sex>babies, not the men having the casual/other sex, resulting in those babies.