Abortion and women's rights.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Abortion opponents boast of their moral outrage at killing, but most don't tend to support policies that would lower the inexcusable U.S. infant mortality rate below its present level, which is higher than virtually all of Europe.

Opposition to abortion is mostly driven by fear that making abortion easily available leads to sexual promiscuity and women not assuming their proper role in society, thus destroying the social fabric. An excellent book on this subject published by Cornell University Press analyzed the history of laws in all fifty states affecting women's rights and freedoms and those affecting the protection of life. It concluded that the states with the strictest abortion laws also offer the poorest protection of women's rights and worst protection of life in all areas other than abortion, and that restricting women's rights was a much stronger motivator of anti-abortion laws than fetal protection. (The Journal of Christian Ethics described the book as a balanced prescription for a "seamless garment of love for unborn children.")