Quiz Six will open on February 28 and close promptly at 1 p.m. on March 3.  You will have only one chance to take this quiz, please study the material in advance.

Reading:

1. Excerpts from The Political Brain:  The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. 
   
2. Kristin Luker, AbortionViews.pdf.  In Sakai, Resources, Week Six.
3. Daniel N Spicer, "World View and Abortion Beliefs," Sociological Inquiry, February 1994.  In Sakai, Resources, WeekSix.
4. A powerpoint, AbortionAttitudesGSS, covers the research results covered in class on March 27. 
   

Notes and Links:

1. Review of Drew Westen's "The Political Brain" on Daily Kos.
2. New York Times Review of The Political Brain.  Reply on Daily Kos. 
   
3. A poweroint, "The Sixties", covers the individuals from last week's readings in Turncoats and True Believers.  It is in Sakai, Resources, Week Six.  (I waited to do this until after you had read the chapter for the quiz).

 

Pro-Life	Pro-Choice
Men and women are intrinsically different.	Men and women are intrinsically similar.
Women are best suited to raising children and families.	Women and men should share child raising.
Tenderness, caring and self-sacrifice are female traits.	Tenderness, caring and self-sacrifice should be male and female traits.
Sexual relations should be for procreative purposes.	Sexual relations are an expression of intimacy and affection, as well as physical desire.
Contraception is wrong because it strips sexual experience of its meaning.	Contraception gives women equality and the ability to plan their own lives.
Women should accept unplanned pregnancies as God's will or as a natural part of being a woman.	Women should be able to control pregnancy and decide whether to become mothers.
Pre-marital and extra-marital sex are wrong because they deprive sexuality of its true meaning.	Pre-marital and extra-marital sex are choices that mature people should be free to make.
Teen-age pregnancy can and should be prevented by advocating abstinance.  Those who sin should be made to suffer the consequences.	Advocating abstinance is ineffective, teens should be educated about a full range of choices.
The embryo is either a human life, with full rights, or it is not - there is no middle ground.  It has a soul that must be protected.	The embryo, especially in early pregnancy, lacks consciousness and full personhood.
Human nature needs to be disciplined and controlled by traditional social institutions.	Social institutions should be modified to meet human needs as conditions change.

The last point is more general than Laker discusses, at least in the excerpt we have.  It fits it into a more general liberal-conservative dimension that might predict attitudes on other issues, e.g, the death penalty.   Logically, you might think "pro-life" people would oppose the death penalty, but perhaps not since it is imposed on people who violated basic social norms, not on innocents.  We can test some of these hypotheses with data from the survey research available in the Microcase databases to which our department subscribes.