mookulatorAug 9, 2023

Americans seem to support abortion access. Why do Republicans keep trying to block it anyway?

https://lemmy.world/post/2919096

Americans seem to support abortion access. Why do Republicans keep trying to block it anyway? - Lemmy.world

The recent vote in Ohio is just one of a string of cases where voters show they mostly support abortion access to some extent (1). Polls show the same. (2) So why do Republicans (specifically Republican politicians, not necessarily Republican voters) keep trying to do something unpopular? My (perhaps cynical) view of Republican politicians is that they’re the “do anything to win” party. They would take any stance and pull any trick if it would give them a better chance of winning. So why are they so stuck on a losing issue? https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/08/ohio-takeaways-voters-abortion-00110411?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20230809&instance_id=99621&nl=the-morning®i_id=78332928&segment_id=141508&te=1&user_id=2c229a9eb418d267c58bd9e6c665e49d [https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/08/ohio-takeaways-voters-abortion-00110411?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20230809&instance_id=99621&nl=the-morning%C2%AEi_id=78332928&segment_id=141508&te=1&user_id=2c229a9eb418d267c58bd9e6c665e49d] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/us/roe-v-wade-abortion-views.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/us/roe-v-wade-abortion-views.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare] T

Show threadcerevantAug 9, 2023
It is a wedge issue that has locked a portion of the population who are single issue voters into being Republicans despite literally all their other beliefs. That is basically what all the non-financial planks of the Republican platform have on common.
Show threadNewNewAccountAug 9, 2023
I don’t know anybody that votes republican because of their abortion stance that doesn’t also agree with the rest of the party’s policies.
Show threadEnigmaAug 9, 2023

My mom was one. Didn’t realize until I was older, and long after she died. But yeah, she only voted Republican because she was anti abortion. She had an abortion and suffered from unintended side effects and didn’t want other women to experience the same. I get where she was coming from, but she definitely had the wrong idea with banning abortion.

Oddly enough, it was a comment on Reddit that opened my eyes to everything. Something along the lines of “Dems don’t want women to have abortions. But we’d like the choice if need be.”

Show threadmookulator
Wow I’ve never heard of someone wanting to ban a medical procedure all together because they experienced an adverse effect of it. Thanks for the view into a psyche that I didn’t know about.
Aug 9, 2023 at 2:45pmWeb
Show threadEnigmaAug 9, 2023
Yeah, she was unable to have kids going forward and ended up needing a complete hysterectomy at 40. This was also the 90s and I’m positive the procedures are more advanced now. But there can be side effects that are often not talked about among pro choice people. I mean they are rare, but it can happen. I know a lot of women who ended up severely depressed after (my mom ran a support group). But that doesn’t mean abortion should be banned, but that mental health support for women who have had abortions is desperately needed and necessary, especially if the baby is wanted.
Show threadmookulatorAug 9, 2023
Yeah I mean I think most people know that there are negative consequences that can happen, just like with any medical procedure. I’m just surprised by the fact that people might get a medical procedure then want to prevent all future people from getting it because they had a bad experience. Shows what I know about people.
Show threadEnigmaAug 9, 2023
I agree. Like I said, I understand where she was coming from, wanting to prevent other women from suffering the same way she did. But there are other ways to go about that and I don’t think she understood that. She’s also black and let’s face it, there is negative history regarding abortions and black women. I mean to this day, you have doctors who believe in old racist bullshit like black people have a higher pain tolerance; medical treatment is often different if you’re white vs black as well.
Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023
Redheads have a stronger tolerance for anesthesia
Show threadjballsAug 9, 2023

That’s crazy, because in my mind her voting makes it much more likely that women would have unsafe abortions. It’s like if I went to a dentist and they did a terrible job filling a cavity, the solution isn’t to ban dentists. Because then next time I have a cavity I’m just gonna have to rip my tooth out with a pliers instead.

Probably shouldn’t compare abortions to dental work… But yeah, I think banning a medical professional from performing an abortion just makes it so a non-professional will have to perform an abortion instead, which is way worse.

Show threadEnigmaAug 9, 2023
Of course, which is why her position was idiotic. But it was an emotional position, not factual one. The most you’re able to do is understand and empathize with why that person holds that position. It’s not rational, but not everyone is able to rationalize for the betterment of society, and those people are able to vote. The only thing we can do is try to out vote those people.
Show threadgivesomefucksAug 9, 2023

Scientists can tell with like 80% accuracy what the political identity of an American is… just from a brain scan.

If the prefrontal cortex is larger and more active, that person is likely to be empathetic and use higher reasoning to control their emotion. Those people overwhelmingly vote Dem.

If the amygdala is larger and more active, then that person is more likely to feel fear or anger and act based on those emotions without thinking.

Then there’s the 20% where they’re just kind of average and it’s a coin toss.

That is why a woman can view her individual experience decades ago with an abortion and use that to rationalize not letting any woman get one now.

She’s not empathetic enough to understand other women may be in a worse spot than she’d have been if she kept.

She isn’t using the critical thinking to understand decades of medical advancement means it’s a lot safer now.

But she is still in fear of her bad outcome.

And she’s still angry she had complications.

If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you’re brain isn’t working the same as the other side. The tragedy is only one side is usually able to understand it. The other side just keeps ranting about crazy shit because they’re constantly terrified or pissed off about a hypothetical.

Show threadNimrodAug 9, 2023
Do you have a source for this?
Show threaddriving_croonerAug 9, 2023
Pretty sure is just one of those studies did on an n = 20 us college students by another group of students that has been never replicated.
Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023
Really? You want to try and play that card mr mengele?
Show threadgivesomefucksAug 9, 2023

At no point did I say this was genetic or couldn’t be changed…

If you weren’t a dick, I probably would have explained that for you.

Do t think you’d have understood, but I’d have given it a shot.

Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023
Oh I understood you, it was a little difficult with your head shoved so far up your own ass on that pedestal you built for yourself, but i managed.
Show threadgivesomefucksAug 9, 2023

So you do understand, you’re just pretending not to?

Have fun with that then

Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023

You just want to try and feel superior to others and your "study" involved 82 people.

That is too small of a sample size to be worth anything, especially since they were dealing with gambling, you know that thing that produces addictive dopamine spikes, and is therefore biased from the beginning.

Show threadgivesomefucksAug 9, 2023

Luckily there’s been a literal decade of further studies backing it up

Cool, huh?

Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023

So you had more information and decided to link only the small sample size on gamblers one?

Seems to me you started this looking for a fight and a gotcha moment now, otherwise why use your worst study first and alone?

Cool, huh?

Show threadNoIWontPickaNameAug 9, 2023

So you had more information and decided to link only the small sample size on gamblers one?

Seems to me you started this looking for a fight and a gotcha moment now, otherwise why use your worst study first and alone?

Cool, huh?

Show threadErkAug 9, 2023
This is the kind of factoid you shouldn’t spread unless you’re prepared to back it up with a lot of hard data and sources, since you’re essentially arguing biological superiority over your opponents. Very little comes from that
Show threadgivesomefucksAug 9, 2023

I already have…

nbcnews.com/…/study-brain-scans-reveal-your-polit…

And it’s not biological, the brain changes even through adulthood.

But my comment is already long enough, it’s not my fault most people don’t understand how brains work, but I bet I can guess the political leaning of all the people who just got mad and replied before scrolling down.

Study: Brain scans reveal your political affiliation

NBC News
Show threadErkAug 9, 2023

This is a very odd comment.

  • I’m not sure how my comment could possibly have been any more calm. I’m just cautioning on sharing that specific type of information without a source handy.
  • You had not posted sources when I left my comment. I cannot predict what you’ll post before you post it.
  • Brains are part of biology. Biology does not mean “unchanging”, I’m very familiar with neuroplasticity.
  • I’m a card carrying socialist. Wrote the card myself. I’m also a doctor and don’t like seeing pop science shared uncritically as a way to imply biological superiority over my opponents, because it doesn’t help my cause in any way.

    • For someone attacking me for perceived anger, I feel like you could take some of your own advice re. counting to ten before posting.

    Show threadastraeusAug 10, 2023

    The source article is a small research article sampling young adults who were students in college. The article itself addresses the scope of its findings aptly:

    Although these results suggest a link between political attitudes and brain structure, it is important to note that the neural processes implicated are likely to reflect complex processes of the formation of political attitudes rather than a direct representation of political opinions per se. The conceptualizing and reasoning associated with the expression of political opinions is not necessarily limited to structures or functions of the regions we identified but will require the involvement of more widespread brain regions implicated in abstract thoughts and reasoning.

    We speculate that the association of gray matter volume of the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex with political attitudes that we observed may reflect emotional and cognitive traits of individuals that influence their inclination to certain political orientations.

    I don’t think it is a good idea to base your opinion of political bias and brain chemistry on a single article’s speculation.

    Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

    Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures []. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors []. Recent work has shown ...

    PubMed Central (PMC)
    Show threadastraeusAug 10, 2023

    This is the foundation for the research article listed in the March 2013 NBC article.

    Fourth paragraph of introduction starts:

    The discovery by Kanai and colleagues [15] that four brain regions implicated in risk and uncertainty (the right amygdala, left insula, right entorhinal cortex, and anterior cingulate (ACC)) differed in liberals and conservatives provided further evidence that political ideology might be connected to differences in cognitive processes.

    Same paragraph concludes:

    The ACC is involved in conflict and error monitoring and in action selection [21], [22]. Thus, the regions implicated in risk and conflict, cognitive processes during which liberals and conservatives have been shown to differ in physiological response, are the similar regions shown by Kanai et al. to differ structurally in liberals and conservatives. If patterns of brain activity in these regions during the evaluation of risks could dependably differentiate liberals and conservatives, then we would have further evidence of the link between mental processes and political preferences.

    Conclusion of the introduction:

    Previous studies [26]–[28] using this risk-taking decision-making task found activity in some of the same regions identified by Kanai et al. as differentiating liberals and conservatives.

    Honestly, I think their finding is more accurately conveyed with this sample:

    Although genetic variation has been shown to contribute to variation in political ideology [48] and strength of partisanship [53], the portion of the variance in political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is significantly larger (see Appendix S1), suggesting that acting as a partisan in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the effect of the heredity.

    The argument here is not so much that brain chemistry predicts political bias, but rather that political bias can influence brain chemistry.

    Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans

    Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and ...

    PubMed Central (PMC)
    Show threadgivesomefucksAug 10, 2023

    I shouldn’t be surprised all these people couldn’t keep their emotion in check for the 2 minutes to check if someone else already tried an excuse before scrolling down and seeing that someone else already tried an excuse and it failed…

    But I still am.

    Everytime I’ve ever brought this up, it pisses off a lot of people who don’t even try to explain it.

    Hint: I already told people there’s a decade of follow up studies.

    Show threadcaptainlezbianAug 9, 2023
    That’s absolutely a thing. It’s partly because nobody listens to “1% will have a complication” because it’s so small and it’s probably going to be nothing, and outside of a handful of procedures it’s not really gone into depth. But when you’re that 1% and it’s bad it’s hard to acknowledge that the gamble was probably a good bet actually or at the very least it could’ve been and you made the choice. It’s especially rough when like abortion neither option has a high risk of serious complications, but the active choice is less risky. That one’s kinda rough on our neurological risk processing