A new study on Congress and Abortion rights

This just in from my sister:

"Male U.S. representatives with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of abortion rights and 'more liberally on a range of women's issues' than male representatives without daughters, according to a working paper published this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research..."

The Executive Director of a West Coast Women's Health Center commented: "This will soon be a new question for progressives interviewing candidates: do you have any daughters?"

But it gets even better: "'each daughter is associated with an increase of nearly three points' on the [National Organization for Women's] rating scale..." These findings cut across party lines.

So, when the reality of forcing women to have babies is at stake, decisionmakers tend to see the light. It reminds me of this from the St. Louis Post Dispatch: "Only four of the 535 members of Congress have children in the military; only one, Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., has a child who fought in Iraq."

500+ Congresspersons were on the verge of voting to send kids to die but only four had kids whose lives hung on the vote? That may be quantitative, but it certainly ain't qualitative representation.

The saddest stat in the whole study: "There were not enough female representatives in the 105th Congress to draw any conclusions about their voting habits with respect to family composition." (Kaisernetwork)

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