Vishniac was also remembered for his humanism and respect for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work.
While I wholeheartedly endorse Viorst's circle-of-life sentiment, I find the tone of her book cloying and its dénouement pat.
But in spite of the electoral victories for the pro-choice side, last year's eruption of extreme pro-life sentiment exposed the continued threats to access to safe abortions and contraception.
As Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College pointed out last year, pro-life sentiment has been steady over the last four decades even as opposition to women in the work force (or the military, or the White House) has largely collapsed.
Meanwhile, divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates both rose with the abortion rate and then fell with it from the early 1990s onward — which, again, is not exactly the pattern you'd expect if abortion-on-demand was a major boon to the two-parent household, and pro-life sentiment a significant driver of family breakdown.
If the Bristol Palin effect were the crucial factor in determining the out-of-wedlock birth rate, and with it family stability more generally, one would expect the rate of single parenthood to either drop or rise more slowly after Roe and then rise more swiftly across the 1990s, as pro-life sentiment began its (pre-Todd Akin) climb.
The abortion argument is changing: Ms Bowman, the polling expert, points to a tiny increase in pro-life sentiment, which can be put down to the grisly nature of late-term or "partial-birth" abortion (which has been banned by federal law, although courts have struck the law down), the ubiquity of ultrasound equipment and maybe worries about fertility.
In a Washington Post op-ed on Monday, Yaver warned that states' "responsiveness to pro-life sentiment" could have negative "health and economic consequences".
The report, titled "When Dual Incentives Become Dueling: Public Health Consequences of Responsiveness to Pro-Life Sentiment," relied on data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the Kaiser Family Foundation to study teen birth and STD rates, state by state, between 2008 and 2013.
It expresses pro-life sentiments, but, as a policy, can never be effectively implemented.
