Disparity Of Abortion

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Every election year, the topic of abortion seems to be on the forefront of a narrow selection of issues the public wants to discuss when they are learning about their political candidates. To be sure, people have very strong beliefs when it comes to abortion, so it should be a surprise to no one exactly how polarizing and divisive this subject is across the nation. But what is it exactly that causes ones emotions to churn when abortion is brought up? Perhaps a better question, what are the core issues considered by women when they are contemplating abortion? Is it their religious faith? How about income disparity? There is, in fact, a litany of reasons to ponder when attempting to understand what the circumstances are that would lead…show more content…
The south incorporates what is known as the “bible belt” portion of the country, as self-professed Christianized territory. According to Christians, abortion is an act of sin – another form of murder. It is appropriate then to predict that those in the south, or at the very least those whom are Christian, would have lower abortion rates than those in the west, or those whom are not Christian. This will serve as our hypothesis for this study; those states that attend church service more frequently will have lower abortion rates than those states who attend service less frequently. Frequency of church attendance will be our independent variable, and rate of abortion will be dependent. Do the facts –or statistics- back this hypothesis…show more content…
The states that have a higher frequency of church service do indeed have fewer cases of abortion per 1000 women. It is however, not as pronounced as one may have expected. Moreover, the distribution –or variance- of the results seems to be all over the place. While a slight downward sloping trend appears on the graph, this phenomenon disappears once we isolate those states whose population attends visits church frequently at least 33% of the time. It is the states that are below 33% that are tilting this regression line downward (negatively). Nonetheless, the data supports this negative relationship. The unstandardized coefficient for frequency of church attendees is -0.300, with a standard error of .157 and a value of .095 for R-square. A state that had no residents that identified to frequent church service would have approximately 28.689 abortions per 1,000 women, which is the y-intercept of our graph. The data tells us that a 10% increase in church membership would decrease this figure by three women per
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