How to Study Effectively by Paul Penn (Aeon)

 

Space out your study sessions

As noted above, it’s better to distribute the time you have available to study over a greater number of shorter sessions than it is to cram your studying into a single marathon session. In thinking about exploiting this ‘spacing effect’ in your own studying, you might wonder whether there is an optimal method of spacing out your study sessions. Is there an ideal number of sessions? Is there an optimal interval between sessions?

The good news is that simple guidelines on scheduling your study sessions are sufficient. In terms of the number of sessions you use, too few is more of a problem than too many. If you have 12 hours to dedicate to a topic, it’s better to study over six two-hour-long sessions than it is to study over a couple of six-hour-long sessions. In terms of the length of intervals between your sessions, research indicates that longer intervals tend to be associated (up to a point) with better retention. However, since studying often takes place in a limited timeframe, you should prioritise the number of sessions over getting the longest possible inter-session intervals.

Alternate between studying similar topics

We often believe that it’s best to ‘block’ topics when studying – to allocate a period of time for one topic, and to conclude a review of it before moving on to the next one. However, contemporary research has consistently indicated that alternating between different topics (referred to as ‘interleaving’) can be more effective, especially for topics that are similar in nature and might otherwise be easily conflated.

As an example, if you were learning about psychoactive drugs (for a friend, of course), you’d probably want to look at different classes of drugs: eg, stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens. Broadly speaking, you could deal with these topics in one of two ways: blocking or interleaving. The blocking approach would involve studying each class of drug sequentially; you would conclude your review of stimulants in their entirety before moving on to depressants and then hallucinogens. Alternatively, you could interleave the classes of drugs by organising your studying around categories of information within them. For example, their definitions, exemplars, mechanism of action and profile of psychological effects. Interleaving would involve first looking at a definition for each class of drug, before moving on to an example from each class, followed by their respective mechanisms of action, and then finally their profiles of psychological effects.

Here’s a general rule of thumb you can follow in figuring out whether it might be better to block or interleave your study efforts. Research indicates that interleaving seems to bias your attention towards looking for differences between topics. Therefore, it’s most effective when you’re studying topics that are similar (and require more effort to distinguish from each other). It’s also effective under conditions where you have discretion about assigning information to a category, as might be the case if you were classifying works of art. In contrast, blocking seems to focus your attention on looking for similarities between topics. Therefore, it’s best used for topics that can be easily distinguished and/or when category membership has been predetermined, such as would be the case if you were learning about elements of the periodic table.

Focus on constructing your own understanding of a topic, not reproducing someone else’s

In the ‘Need to Know’ section above, we noted that memory is fundamentally reconstructive, as opposed to reproductive, in nature. If you rely on passively rereading your course materials, you’ll tend to end up using your memory to try to reproduce the author’s understanding of the subject rather than generating your own. So, what is the best catalyst for generating your own understanding of what you read? The answer is to question what you read as you’re reading it. By responding to your own questions, you are forcing yourself to think about how to explain the subject matter in your own words and with reference to your previous knowledge and experience.

You can use an approach called elaborative interrogation to systematically incorporate the process of questioning into your reading. This technique involves annotating your sources with questions that require an explanatory response from you. You can provide this response verbally, initially using your sources for assistance. Do this iteratively with the aim of eventually not needing to consult your sources at all during the process of responding to your questions.

In using elaborative interrogation, try to focus on explanation as much as you can; your aim is to make the information as meaningful to you as possible. Phrasing your questions so they begin with ‘why’ or ‘how’ will help you do this, as will thinking about concrete examples of more abstract concepts. For example, you might annotate this section with the question: ‘Why is responding to your own questions conducive to the reconstructive nature of memory?’

Make retrieval practice an integral part of your studying

Given that the purpose of studying is to prepare for an exam of some kind, it’s ironic that we tend to favour approaches such as rereading over testing our ability to retrieve information from memory (retrieval practice). Testing is not just a way of measuring learning; it can also be a powerful mechanism of learning. This is another one of those findings in psychology that is so robust as to now be considered axiomatic. It’s referred to as the testing effect.

Contrary to how it might feel, both success and failure to retrieve information are helpful for your memory. Both outcomes serve to calibrate confidence in your perception of your knowledge. This is invaluable information in orienting your studying so that it is based on evidence of progress rather than guesswork! When studying, it’s not what you think you know that matters, but rather what you can prove you know. Strange, isn’t it? You probably always thought of tests as your nemesis and studiously tried to avoid them. Yet that whole time, you could have used them as a tool of learning.

You should not make the mistake of dismissing retrieval practice as a cynical exercise in ‘learning to a test’. Its usefulness is not limited to scenarios where you know what questions will be featured in a forthcoming exam. Nor does its effectiveness depend upon congruence between the content or format of your retrieval practice and the exam you eventually take. Furthermore, the benefits of retrieval practice are not simply limited to facts; they also extend to concepts and the transfer of knowledge from one domain to another.

You can incorporate retrieval practice organically into your studying by using the read, recite, review (3R) approach. This involves reading a short passage of text, putting the source to one side and trying to recall the information in your own words, before checking your recall against the source for factual accuracy. You repeat these steps until you are satisfied with your ability to capture the meaning (not words) of the source material in question. If you type out your attempts to recite information from your sources rather than just verbally recall them, you’ll be organically producing notes that capture your understanding of the material.

Don’t just highlight material, think about it

By this point you will have gathered that interaction with your sources is important in studying effectively, but you should know that not all types of interaction are created equal. For example, highlighting text is a method that’s widely used by students. Ostensibly, this seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do when studying. Explicitly identifying the most important parts of a source should help focus your attention by filtering out less relevant material and reducing the burden on your memory.

However, the literature on the effectiveness of highlighting makes for unhappy reading, especially if you own a stationery shop. On the rare occasions where a study has shown highlighting to have a positive effect on learning, it’s not been the act of highlighting per se that is behind the effect. Rather, it’s the thinking behind what is being highlighted – why the highlighted information is significant – that counts. Indeed, research indicates that the people who report using highlighting most frequently tend to do it the least effectively and get the least benefit from its use. I know it’s nice to think that a highlighter works like an optical scanner with a direct connection to your long-term memory, but it is no substitute for mentally engaging with the text.

 

Key points

• You can’t rely on intuition about how well your studying practices are working for you. Intuitive judgments of learning are often inaccurate and tend to produce an inflated perception of progress.
• Avoid defaulting to habitual, passive approaches to studying such as rereading and highlighting sources. These do not take advantage of the reconstructive nature of memory, and make it more tedious and less effective.
• Systematic engagement with the meaning of your source material is the key to successful studying.
• Rather than cramming your studying into an extended session before the exam, it’s much more effective to distribute the time you have available for studying over a larger number of shorter sessions.
• When you are studying similar topics that might be easily confused, it’s a good idea to interleave your studying – to alternate between the topics during your study sessions. This can help you identify the differences between the topics and reduce the chances of them being conflated.
• You should view self-testing as an integral part of your studying. One way to do this is the read, recite and review (3R) method: read a section of text, set it aside as you try to recall its content in your own words, and then check your recall, repeating as necessary. 

-AEON

Paul Penn is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of East London. He is the author of The Psychology of Effective Studying: How to Succeed in Your Degree (2019) and the winner of the 2021 UK Higher Education Psychology Teacher of the Year award.

While Washington bickers about what, if anything, has been achieved after 20 years and nearly $5tn spent on “forever wars”, there is one clear winner: the US defense industry (by Professor Linda J Bilmes)

 

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the American military relied to an unprecedented degree on private contractors for support in virtually all areas of war operations. Contractors supplied trucks, planes, fuel, helicopters, ships, drones, weapons and munitions as well as support services from catering and construction to IT and logistics. The number of contractors on the ground outnumbered US troops most years of the conflicts. By the summer of 2020, the US had 22,562 contractor personnel in Afghanistan – roughly twice the number of American troops.

The gravy train for the defense industry was also fueled by the way the wars were budgeted and paid for. Congress used “emergency” and “contingency” funding that circumvented the normal budget process. For the first decade of the conflict, the US used emergency appropriations, which are typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Detailed spending oversight was minimal. And because this type of spending is excluded from budget projections and deficit estimates, it enabled everyone to sustain the pretense that the wars would be over shortly.

The result was what former defense secretary Robert Gates termed a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon. The defense department made the operational decisions; managed the bidding process for contractors; awarded the contracts (largely using non-competitive bids); and kept at least 10% of the wartime funding in classified accounts.

Not even the financial crisis of 2008 could interrupt the spending spree. While Congress imposed across-the-board spending caps on government programs, war spending was specifically excluded. The Pentagon was able to use the special “contingency” war budget to buy upgrades, services and new equipment that were barely related to Iraq or Afghanistan. Consequently, the Pentagon budget kept growing – and was able to double its size between 2001 and 2020.

Defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by nearly 60% during the Afghanistan war, as the war spending surge enabled a wave of consolidation in the industry. The big five – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – and a handful of others acquired the next tier of manufacturers such as Hughes Aircraft and McDonnell Douglas.

In the year to June 2020 the big five accounted for nearly a third of the $480bn obligated by the Pentagon to defense contractors. While only a fraction of these sales went specifically for Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflict was highly lucrative for all the major defense contractors. 

For example, Lockheed Martin manufactured the Black Hawk helicopters used extensively in Afghanistan; Boeing sold the aircraft and land combat vehicles; Raytheon won the major contract training the Afghan air force; and Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics supplied electronic and communications equipment. Thousands of subcontractors around the world earned money from selling night-vision goggles, engines, sandbags, communications equipment and all manner of stuff to the war effort. And global oil companies were key war beneficiaries, since the Pentagon is the world’s single largest purchaser of fuel.

Meanwhile, the defense sector spent over $2.4bn lobbying Congress since 2001, and made direct campaign contributions to most members.

Not surprisingly, much of the wartime expenditures were highly wasteful. The Inspectors Generals for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wartime Contracting Commission, and the Pentagon’s own inspector general all documented waste, profiteering, corruption and “ghost spending” (money spent on activities that turned out not to exist at all).

According to government analysts, the net result of the large-scale private sector involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was to increase materially the cost of war operations. Much of the $145bn reconstruction money was spent on questionable projects with budgets that seemed excessive, or simply could not be accounted for. Many such projects, now destroyed and dilapidated, have littered the front pages over the past week.

The US presence on the ground may now be over. But America will still have to digest the huge price tag. The wars were paid for entirely with borrowed money rather than raising taxes – a first in US military history – and the US still owes $2tn in future veterans’ benefits. This financial hangover will be compounded by the need to replace what has been destroyed or simply left behind, and to pay for the weapons and equipment purchased during the last 20 years of go-go defense spending. The legacy of the post-9/11 defense spending binge will continue to gobble up the US budget for years to come.

The Guardian

Professor Linda J Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan chair in public policy and public finance at Harvard University, and a former US assistant secretary of commerce. She is co-author (with Joseph E Stiglitz) of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. 

 

Mu variant: what to know about the latest COVID-19 ‘variant of interest’

 

Right now delta is the COVID-19 variant on everyone’s minds, but there’s a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, that has experts, including the World Health Organization (WHO), sitting up and taking notice. That new variant is called mu.

Here’s what you need to know about it:

What is the mu variant? Mu is the most recent significant variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Its official Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak (Pango) lineage designation is B.1.621. According to the World Health Organization, early indicators suggest mu might be better at evading vaccines, antibody treatments, and the natural immunity gained from previous COVID-19 infections. On August 30, the WHO named mu a “variant of interest.”

How is a “variant of interest” different than a “variant of concern?” While the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates all the time, some mutations become significant because they give the virus new abilities or can impact the human body in new ways. The WHO classifies these significant mutations as either “variants of concern” or “variants of interest.” Alpha, beta, gamma, and delta are the only variants of concern, which means there is ample evidence the variants are more dangerous than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. Variants of interest, on the other hand—which mu is—are variants that have the potential to increase harm, but more research is needed to confirm this. If increased harm is confirmed, a variant of interest will become an official variant of concern.

What does the WHO say about mu? In its most recent weekly briefing, the WHO states, “the mu variant has a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape. Preliminary data presented to the Virus Evolution Working Group show a reduction in neutralization capacity of convalescent and vaccine sera similar to that seen for the beta variant, but this needs to be confirmed by further studies.”

Where and when was mu first detected? The mu variant was first detected in Columbia in January 2021. It currently makes up 39% of COVID-19 cases in Columbia and 13% of COVID-19 cases in Ecuador.

What countries is mu in now? Mu is currently in at least 39 countries, mainly in South America. However, mu has also been detected in the United States, Europe, and Hong Kong.

Is mu resistant to vaccines? Early signs indicate that vaccines could be less effective against mu than they are against the delta variant (which already reduces vaccines’ effectiveness). However, there aren’t any signs yet that mu is completely resistant to vaccines. And any resistance still needs to be confirmed through further study.  

-Reported by Fast Company

Lies and Violence in America

“The American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids. One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers. We’ve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to Qanon to covid-denialism to Trump’s election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other antiracist protestors at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.

“The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie, a familiar one in which six-week embryos are called fetuses and a heartbeat is attributed to the cluster of cells that is not yet a heart not yet powering a circulatory system. Behind it are other lies, in which women have abortions because they are reckless, wanton, and callous, rather than, in the great number of cases, because of the failure of birth control, or coercive sex, or medical problems, including threats to the health of the mother or a non-viable pregnancy, and financial problems, including responsibility for existing children.

“But what was new about the Texas bill is its invitation to its residents to become vigilantes, bounty-hunters, and snitches. This will likely throw a woman who suspects she is pregnant into a hideous state of fearful secrecy, because absolutely anyone can profit off her condition and anyone who aids her, from the driver to the doctor, is liable. It makes pregnancy a crime, since it is likely to lead to the further criminalization even of the significant percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It will lead women – particularly the undocumented, poor, the young, those under the thumbs of abusive spouses or families – to die of life-threatening pregnancies or illicit abortions or suicide out of despair. A vigilante who goes after a woman is willing to see her die.

“The rightwing stance on abortion is often treated as a contradiction coming from a political sector that sings in praise of unfettered liberty to do as you like, including carry semiautomatic weapons in public and spread a sometimes fatal virus. But like the attack on voting rights in Texas happening simultaneously with the attack on reproductive rights, it is of course about expanding liberty for some while withering it away for others. The attacks on reproductive rights seek to make women unfree and unequal; the attacks on voting rights seek to make people of color unfree and unequal; women of color get a double dose.

“This is the logical outcome of a party that, some decades back, looked at an increasingly non-white country and decided to try to suppress the votes of people of color rather than win them. Not just the Democratic party but democracy is their enemy. In this system in which some animals are more equal than others, some have the right to determine the truth more than others, and facts, science, history are likewise fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality, which you enforce through dominance, including outright violence.

“What was the 6 January coup attempt but this practice writ large? A mountain of lies about the outcome of an election was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi. The sheer berserk violence of it was extraordinary, the mostly middle-aged mostly white mostly men trying to gouge out eyeballs and trampling their own underfoot while screaming and spraying bear spray in the faces of those guarding the building and the elected officials within and the election.

“Their leaders produced lies that instigated the violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to stir up further violence. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who by his own account furiously begged Trump to call off the attackers, has since been trying to sabotage the investigation into what happened. As the New York Times reported this week: ‘Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.’ He is trying to prevent Congress and the public from knowing what has gone on. Which you could also call covering up a crime, in public, and his threats may themselves constitute crimes.

“Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina freshman congressman who appeared onstage on 6 January to whip up the crowd, calls the rioters ‘political prisoners’ and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election, declaring: ‘If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.’ Cawthorne, like the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes set the Texas abortion law into action Wednesday, has been accused of sexual misconduct. While men across the political spectrum are accused of similar wrongdoing – Andrew Cuomo’s conduct led to New York getting its first female governor last month – in the Republican case it is not an ideological inconsistency. The ideological premise is that one’s own rights matter so much that others’ rights do not matter at all, and that goes from rape to mask and vaccine policies to the proliferation of guns and gun deaths in recent years.

“There is no clear way to tell if the right is emboldened because they’ve gotten away with so much in the past five years, or whether they’re increasingly desperate because they are in a wild gamble, but it seems like both at once. If the US defends its democracy, such as it is, and protects the voting rights of all eligible adults, the right will continue to be a shrinking minority. Their one chance of overturning that requires overturning democracy itself. That’s one goal they’re willing to use violence to achieve and no longer bothering to lie about” (Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian).

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses.

 

"SB 8 was not the only major piece of legislation that came out of the Texas legislature this year"

 

“Senate Bill 8, the Texas law that effectively bans abortions in the state by criminalizing any procedures after six weeks, is a bad law, not just in the sense that it accomplishes a bad thing—by effectively depriving women of their formerly constitutionally protected rights—but in the sense that it was written with all the legal authority of a ransom note. The law, in addition to the ban itself, proposes to enforce this prohibition by creating what Justice Sonia Sotomayor describes as ‘citizen bounty hunters.’

“Private citizens can earn $10,000 by filing a lawsuit against anyone who has so much as offered a ride to someone else to get to an abortion clinic in Texas. Unlike traditional litigation, a plaintiff in one of these cases would not need to demonstrate that they have been harmed to receive this fee. It’s simply a harassment stipend; if you see something, we’ll pay you something. When the law passed the legislature this spring, even some of its own supporters thought it might be unconstitutional.

“But SB 8 was not the only major piece of legislation that came out of the Texas legislature this year. On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle helpfully rounded up other bills that have gone into effect or will soon. It is not pretty:

• Anyone over 21 in the state without a criminal record can now open-carry a firearm—no need for a permit or any sort of training.
• Protesters who block freeways will now face felony charges. 
• Homeless encampments are now illegal. 
• Voting access was significantly curtailed while the powers of poll watchers were significantly expanded.
• Teachers are prohibited from teaching whatever angry parents or school boards decide is “critical race theory.” 
• Professional sports teams are required to play the national anthem before games, under threat of losing tax subsidies if they don’t. (They should not have those subsidies in the first place, but that’s another story.)
• And any business that requires proof of vaccination from customers could lose its operating license. 

“It could be worse, I suppose: They could have put a $10,000 bounty on the restaurant owners and history teachers, too. This is a strange list, but as a mission statement of what the conservative movement is and isn’t for in 2021, it is quite coherent. The sum of these measures is an endorsement of governance as a display of cultural dominance, rather than governance as a means to make anything work better for anyone. And there is so much that doesn’t work.

“Earlier this year, I wrote about how the animating ethos for much of today’s Republican Party was shit posting. The movement’s most ambitious figures, interpreting the wishes of their voters, seem more interested in the appearance of governing than in the real thing. They do loud, visible things, and spend way too much time on social media. They want what their base wants, which is to put other people in place, and they seem little interested in anything else.

“They pass blatantly unconstitutional laws to score a point or lodge ridiculous constitutional challenges of their own just to be seen. And then sometimes the Supreme Court just decides to let them have their way anyway, because the justices came out of this same movement too—that’s why they’re there, after all.

“While the Texas legislature was doing all of those things, it was also not doing other things. It did pass a set of reforms designed to correct some of what ails the Texas power grid—such as requiring power companies to weatherize their plants—but declined, for instance, to authorize any money to pay for it or apply the same mandates to the natural-gas industry. And any improvements are not expected to be in place before 2022. The state government’s major response to the fourth wave of the coronavirus has been to strip local authorities and private businesses of their ability to do anything about it, in order to score nihilistic culture-war victories over masking and vaccines. Texas is, statistically speaking, one of the worst places in the United States to give birth, but the state’s leaders would still rather turn away free money from Washington than spend it on health care for poor people.

“When the Atlantic’s Emma Green asked Texas Right to Life’s legislative director, John Seago, whether the group would advocate for Medicaid expansion to ensure that women have access to health care during and after pregnancy—supporting Medicaid expansion while limiting abortion access is the position of the governor of neighboring Louisiana—he demurred.”

-Tim Murphy for Mother Jones

"Texas has effectively destroyed the right to legal abortion" -Heather Cox Richardson

 

In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s anti-abortion S.B. 8 law and the Supreme Court’s acceptance of that law continues to become clear.

By 1:00 this afternoon, the Fox News Channel had mentioned the decision only in a 20-second news brief in the 5 am hour. In political terms, it seems the dog has caught the car.

As I’ve said repeatedly, most Americans agree on most issues, even the hot button ones like abortion. A Gallup poll from June examining the issue of abortion concluded that only 32% of Americans wanted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned, while 58% of Americans opposed overturning it.

"’Overturning Roe v. Wade,’" Lydia Saad of Gallup wrote, “is a shorthand way of saying the Supreme Court could decide abortion is not a constitutional right after all, thus giving control of abortion laws back to the states. This does not sit well with a majority of Americans or even a large subset of Republicans. Not only do Americans oppose overturning Roe in principle, but they oppose laws limiting abortion in early stages of pregnancy that would have the same practical effect.”

While it is hard to remember today, the modern-day opposition to abortion had its roots not in a moral defense of life but rather in the need for President Richard Nixon to win votes before the 1972 election. Pushing the idea that abortion was a central issue of American life was about rejecting the equal protection of the laws embraced by the Democrats far more than it was ever about using the government to protect fetuses.

Abortion had been a part of American life since its inception, but states began to criminalize abortion in the 1870s. By 1960, an observer estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal U.S. abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround.

To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew.

The rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives. Its leaders were latecomers to the reproductive rights movement, but they came to see reproductive rights as key to self-determination. In 1969, activist Betty Friedan told a medical abortion meeting: “[M]y only claim to be here, is our belated recognition, if you will, that there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process….”

In 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and vowed to work for modernization. Their convention that year reiterated its “belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves” but also called on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

By 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion was between a woman and her doctor. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed, as did 59% of Democrats.

In keeping with that sentiment, in 1973, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Harry Blackmun, decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing first-trimester abortion.

The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. In a 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal, they showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began in 1972—the year before the decision—and that it was a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics.

In 1972, Nixon was up for reelection, and he and his people were paranoid that he would lose. His adviser Pat Buchanan was a Goldwater man who wanted to destroy the popular New Deal state that regulated the economy and protected social welfare and civil rights. To that end, he believed Democrats and traditional Republicans must be kept from power and Nixon must win reelection.

Catholics, who opposed abortion and believed that "the right of innocent human beings to life is sacred," tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Buchanan, who was a Catholic himself, urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the 1972 election over the issue of abortion. In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law; in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

Although Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern had similar stances on abortion, Nixon and Buchanan defined McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," a radical framing designed to alienate traditionalists.

As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses; she said: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society.

Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Traditional Republicans supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but radical right Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder.

Movement Conservatives preached traditional roles, and in 1974, the TV show Little House on the Prairie started its 9-year run, contributing, as historian Peggy O’Donnell has explored, to the image of white women as wives and mothers in the West protected by their menfolk. So-called prairie dresses became the rage in the 1970s.

This image was the female side of the cowboy individualism personified by Ronald Reagan. A man should control his own destiny and take care of his family unencumbered by government. Women should be wives and mothers in a nuclear family. In 1984, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother. They wanted an active government to give them rights they didn't need or deserve.

By 1988, Rush Limbaugh, the voice of Movement Conservatism, who was virulently opposed to taxation and active government, demonized women's rights advocates as "Femi-nazis" for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The complicated issue of abortion had become a proxy for a way to denigrate the political opponents of the radicalizing Republican Party.

Such threats turned out Republican voters, especially the evangelical base. But support for safe and legal abortion has always been strong, as it remains today. Until yesterday, Republican politicians could pay lip service to opposing the Roe v. Wade decision to get anti-abortion voters to show up at the polls, without facing the political fallout of actually getting rid of the decision.

Now, though, Texas has effectively destroyed the right to legal abortion.

The fact that the Fox News Channel is not mentioning what should have been a landmark triumph of its viewers’ ideology suggests Republicans know that ending safe and legal abortion is deeply unpopular. Their base finally, after all these years, got what it wanted. But now the rest of the nation, which had been assured as recently as the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that Roe v. Wade was settled law that would not be overturned, gets a chance to weigh in.

-Heather Cox Richardson

https://news.gallup.com/poll/350804/americans-opposed-overturning-roe-wade.aspx

https://jezebel.com/the-settler-fantasies-woven-into-the-prairie-dresses-1831746430

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash,” The Yale Law Journal, 120 (June 2011): 2028–2087, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41149586

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2016/02/02/whats-wrong-with-equal-rights-for-women-1972/

 

"The Supreme Court has let an established constitutional right die in the shadows" (Slate)

 

Of Course This Supreme Court Ended Roe v. Wade by Doing Nothing.

The conservative justices excel at overturning precedent without admitting it. This time, they didn’t have to say a word.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, not with a momentous majority opinion, but by doing nothing. That’s all it took for the Supreme Court to let Texas’ six-week abortion ban take effect on Sept. 1: silence. As the clock ticked toward midnight, and anti-abortion protesters gathered outside Texas clinics to harass patients and staff, the justices kept mum. A few hours later, the country woke up to its post-Roe future.

At this moment, any person can sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion that takes place in Texas after six weeks of pregnancy—which is when more than 85 percent of abortions are performed—for a minimum of $10,000, plus attorneys’ fees. Any person can sue a clinic that performs these abortions and obtain a court order shutting it down.

There is now a $10,000 bounty on the heads of every individual who facilitates abortion, including friends, family members, counselors, even clergy who support a patient’s decision to terminate. Anyone who forms the mere intent to “abet” an abortion may be sued, even if they do not follow through. Texas devised a devious workaround to Roe by threatening abortion patients’ entire support network with bankruptcy. And the Supreme Court let it happen.

How did we get here? The answer can be boiled down to two names: Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Both justices are significantly more conservative than their predecessors—in Barrett’s case, the polar opposite—and both are comfortable manipulating the court’s procedures to reach radical results. At the same time, both justices excel in overruling precedent without acknowledging it. SCOTUS has already taken a case that will probably gut abortion rights by June 2022.

But with its new law, Texas handed Kavanaugh and Barrett a gift: They could eviscerate Roe months earlier without writing a single word. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did the dirty work for SCOTUS by preventing a federal judge from blocking the ban or even holding a hearing on its constitutionality. All the justices had to do was nothing.

The court’s inaction is especially galling in light of its aggressive intervention in cases it deems important. SCOTUS has treated case after case as an emergency in need of immediate resolution. It raced to block blue states’ COVID restrictions, it ended the CDC’s eviction moratorium in the midst of the delta surge, and it continually cleared away lower court decisions blocking Donald Trump’s extreme cutbacks on legal immigration.

To the conservative justices, these policies qualified as an emergency. Texas’ abortion ban, it seems, does not. By refusing to lift a finger, the Supreme Court has telegraphed to the states that it does not view an illegal assault on abortion rights as a pressing matter requiring immediate attention. It gave the green light to impatient red states that won’t wait for SCOTUS to reverse precedent. These states can pass blatantly unconstitutional laws, persuade far-right judges not to block them, and count on the Supreme Court to stay out of it.

In February, Cardozo Law professor and Strict Scrutiny co-host Kate Shaw mused that the Supreme Court might “overrule Roe in the shadow docket,” adding that “right now, there’s nothing stopping them but potentially public opinion and blowback.” After Texas’ law took effect, though, there was remarkably little blowback outside the small world of lawyers, commentators, and advocates laser-focused on reproductive rights. Initially, the New York Times and the Washington Post treated the court’s inaction as a below-the-fold story.

It took several hours on Wednesday morning for much of the media to catch up with the fact that SCOTUS allowed a state to ban abortion. And this, we can assume, is exactly how the conservative justices wanted to end Roe: not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with silence, confusion, and queasy uncertainty.

Within a few hours or days, the Supreme Court will likely issue an order in this case. By that point, clinics will have canceled hundreds, if not thousands, of patients’ appointments. So much damage has already been done, and we do not even know which justices to blame. There is presumably some battle raging behind the scenes at SCOTUS, dueling opinions flying back and forth between each wing of the court.

But we will not see it. We do not even get the transparency of oral arguments and full briefing. The court has chosen to deal with this case in the dark. And it could not be bothered to reach a resolution before the fallout from the law began. No wonder a key proponent of the Texas bill is already boasting that he plans to introduce identical measures in other GOP-controlled states.

The conservative majority has spent several years amassing the power to intervene in any legal dispute that catches its eye. It has transformed the shadow docket into a roving veto.

On Tuesday night, faced with a clear-cut violation of a nearly 50-year precedent—the rare instance of a state flouting constitutional precedent and getting away with it in the lower courts—the conservative justices declined to exercise this power. At a bare minimum, the monumental conflict over reproductive autonomy deserved a full and fair hearing in open court. Instead, the Supreme Court has let an established constitutional right die in the shadows.

 Slate