From Peace Studies: “Legitimation of Violence” Model
 
        Dane Archer was puzzled about why homicide rates often rose in nations after war. Was it because of returning veterans? No, women and the older also had an upsurge in committing homicides. Frustration from losing the war? No, rates were higher in victorious nations. It wasn’t economic conditions. He proposed the most likely explanation:  “What all wars have in common is the unmistakable moral lesson that homicide is an acceptable, even praiseworthy, means to certain ends. It seems likely that this lesson will not be lost on at least some of the citizens in a warring nation."
        This is from his 1984 book is Violence and Crime in Cross-national Perspective, by Yale University Press.
        In another chapter he applied the same point to capital punishment. The year after specific countries abolished capital punishment, the homicide rate usually decreased. The government model of executions was no longer available as a suggestion on how to solve personal problems.
        Now we have this information from the U.S. state of Oregon: while the suicide rate had dipped in the 1990s, it’s now above the national average. They legalized physician-assisted suicide, not taking into account how this might serve as a government-sanctioned model to be copied. 
  

 
Conferences
 
        We like to have literature tables at conferences. Some people agree with us and are grateful to find us, thus giving them good information and more backbone to discuss the issues with their friends. Some are interested and open-minded. Others are hostile, but we help break stereotypes for a good long-term impact.
        If you know of conferences we could cover, or are interested in volunteering to table-sit at conferences close to you or which you’re attending, please let Bill Samuel know at president@consistent-life.org.
 

 
Photo: Bill Samuel (left) and John Whitehead (right) at recent Students for Life Conference
 

 
More Thoughts: Why the Abortion Drop?
 
        When announcing a 13% drop in abortions in the U.S. from 2008-2011, the Alan Guttmacher Institute declared it due to greater contraception use, not to increased state regulations. Pro-lifers, of course, argue that both state laws and the steep drop in the number of abortion clinics were major explanations.
        The ratio of abortion to live births also went down. So while only a portion of the drop is due to pregnant women deciding not to abort, that’s part of it.
         If people took greater care not to get pregnant, this could be by contraception, or by couples deciding to hold off on sex, or women resisting male pressure for sex, or men stopping applying the pressure. All methods would have the same effect on the statistics.
        But there’s a further problem with AGI’s assertion. All techniques could be due in large part to lesser availability or greater repugnance to abortion. That is, AGI has it backward – not that Planned Parenthood’s efforts at pregnancy prevention caused a decrease in abortions, but that people regarding abortion as less of an option led to greater care in pregnancy prevention.
        We are, after all, dealing with a generation of young people who have pre-birth ultrasound photos of themselves.
 

 
Quotation of the Week
Dorothy Day




        People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.