Sunday, August 29, 2010

All a-Twitter: "Red states" Google abortion more. Why?

Jill Stanek posts her Weekend Question: Why is “abortion” googled more in pro-life states?

Abortion supporters postulate that it's because abortion facilities are harder to locate in these states. How would that explain it? Doesn't EVERYBODY who is scheduling an abortion looking up the phone number? If you were googling abortion just to make an appointment, you'd google it once and be done with it, and you'd be googling whether or not there was a handy abortionist in town. When I was looking for a clothes drying rack, I googled clothes drying racks for days, comparing reviews, then drove down to Lowe's and bought one. I didn't have to do all that googling because clothes drying racks were difficult to avail myself of, but because I was planning a purchase and doing my research. And any reasonably bright internet-using woman contemplating abortion is going to do the same thing -- google "abortion" and shop around -- unless she's a frequent flier and they know her by sight down at the mill.

I'd say there are two underlying causes of the higher "abortion" googles in "red states" --

1. Prolifers tend to do more research. (You can see this in any number of studies showing that more knowledge of abortion tends to correlate with a prolife stand, and great confidence in one's misinformation about abortion tends to correlate with a prochoice stand).

2. When abortion laws and regulations are proposed, it puts abortion into the news and sparks curiosity, so people google it to find out which side is telling the truth.

No huge mystery.

The more laws we propose, the more regulations, the more we keep abortion in the news, the more people will become curiuos and start googling. And the more prolife they'll become.

Read it and weep, abortion lovers!

3 comments:

L. said...

"Abortion lover" here.

And I'm not weeping -- I think knowledge is power.

Christina Dunigan said...

L, you're a bit of an odd duck -- an abortion supporter who has no objection to people becoming truly informed, not just better indoctrinated.

Tom said...

Perhaps I am mistaken, because I don’t follow reality TV, but didn’t Kourtney Kardashian (star of E!’s Keeping up with the Kardashians) recently have and out of wedlock birth? She decided against an abortion after she read about it on the internet. This decision seemed to surprise everyone at the time…but now she has her precious son Madison. I am willing to bet she did more than one Google search that included the word “abortion”.

“Pregnant Kourtney Kardashian says she considered getting an abortion. Kourtney said after consulting her doctors on the risks of abortion, and reading horror stories on the Internet, she did some soul-searching.”
--As quoted by People Magazine

http://www.jillstanek.com/?s=Kourtney+Kardashian
http://officialkourtneyk.celebuzz.com/