Pro Life or Pro Choice

The United Nations Conference held in Cairo in September 1994 was dominated by the debate on abortion. The strong opposition to abortion, and attacks on feminist attitudes by the Vatican could not be ignored, even though many Catholics in Catholic countries did not share the Vatican's views (Keyfitz 1995, pp. 81-89). Support for the Vatican from Muslims also made abortion a significant issue in the debate and resulted in the 1994 Conference having a stronger impact on the public than previous UN population conferences. In this paper we examine attitudes to abortion in a North American ethno-religious group with its own ethics the Mennonites who provide an ideal setting for testing the impact of a number of variables on attitudes to abortion, including religious commitment, pacifism, socio-economic status, and individualism. Mennonites were chosen because they were a branch of the Anabaptists who were radical pacifists and refused to take part in wars. They moved into cities after the end of World War II, and by 1989 half of them (48 per cent) were town dwellers and more than four times as many worked as professionals (teaching, health, welfare, legal, social services), rather than farmers (28 per cent and seven per cent respectively). The theoretical perspective which we found useful in our study is that put forward by Kristin Luker who claims that the abortion controversy was less concerned with the welfare of the fetus than with the social status of women and mothers. Abortion represents

Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Psychology

• Blessing unintended pregnancy

  Open Access•Don Seeman, Iman Roushdy-Hammady et al.•Medicine Anthropology Theory•2020

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• Should prenatal sex selection be restricted? Ethical questions and their implications for research and policy

  Daniel Goodkind•Population Studies•1999

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• Abortion

  Laurence H Tribe•Abortion•1990

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• Abortion

  Open Access•Perminder S Sachdev, Paul Sachdev•Population•1984

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