Abortion = selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
"I've actually read in the Daily Telegraph where a certain imam from the Lakemba mosque actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years' time. I didn't believe him at the time but when you actually look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence...."
--Australian MP Danna Vale

These people are way behind. I had this idea 14 years ago in high school. I had mixed feelings about abortion, which most people still do. I thought it was immoral under some circumstances, but trying to legislate against it creates all kinds of problems, like encouraging unsafe abortions. So I thought about it in terms of natural selection: if there are genes for the kind of people who are willing to have abortions, let them have abortions and the genes will eventually be selected out!

That's a fairly simplistic view of why people have abortions, though. Some people will have one abortion and later have children, or a poor woman with a lot of children might feel she can't support another one, so she'll have an abortion. There are probably lots of reasons or situations I'm not imagining, but it wouldn't work that clearly, even if you wanted it to.

For the same reason, I don't think liberals around the world or the vaguely racist liberals in Australia have much to worry about. [For one thing, why would it be horrible if Australia became a Muslim nation? WASPs in the US have always fretted over a similar "threat" here in America, that Spanish will become the majority language in a few decades and the average skintone of Americans will be a little darker even without tan-in-a-bottle. Big friggin deal. Hate to tell you, but unless you have a pedigree, you probably have some mix of lighter and darker skintones in your background, not to mention cro-magnons or homo epicurious or whatever the hell. Think back on how many of your distant ancestors probably had children through systematic rape, maybe it will take your mind off the "threat" of your country ceasing to be whitebread.]

Anyways, Australia can stop freaking out, because if you give enough Muslims access to abortion, they'll holler and condemn it for ages, but just like the right-wing Christians, I bet they'll quietly use it. I don't mean that as a slam against Muslims. It's just human nature. Think of all the religious groups that condemn the use of alcohol, smoking, drugs, Mormons even have a disdain for caffeine. Now do a headcount of how many Amish meth dealers there are, seriously. Has Islam eradicated alcoholism in their Islamic communities? Have Mormons eradicated alcoholism or drug-use or caffeine abuse? American Christians certainly haven't been able to, even though they've talked against it for years. For the religious groups who fight against abortion, have they eradicated abortion among their members? I doubt it.

That's why the Wall Street Journal article above is absurd. The survey asks how many people close to you have had abortions, and they find that Republicans report fewer than Dems. It seems to show that Dems are gradually reducing their own numbers through abortions. But are people always honest in surveys? Abortion carries a stigma, so people don't want to admit that their close friends or family have had them, even to some anonymous, clinical poll-taker. And would you really know if the people close to you have had abortions? Isn't it possible they've withheld that from each other? A lot of people wouldn't know how many abortions their close relatives had, even if they were willing to tell the truth about it.

I wouldn't say that Republicans are more likely to be liars in general, but they probably have a higher stigma attached to abortion, so they're more likely to lie about this, and their family or friends are less likely to share it with them. (How many Democratic grandchildren tell their Republican grandparents about their abortions?)

So the surveys are skewed, and even if they were right, I had the same wrong idea long before them.