Thursday, May 07, 2015

Was abolitionism a failure?


AHA invokes the movement to abolish slavery in American as historical precedent to show that we can do the same thing with respect to abortion. 

Aside from the fact that some key abolitionists are methodological incrementalists, the comparison also suffers from the further fact that, according to this historian (see below), the success of the abolitionist movement depended on certain quirky contingencies. Change a variable here and there, and you get a different outcome:

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