Welcome folks to the First Things Editor's Desk podcast where I talked to various authors in the magazine, and this is Rusty Rio, the editor of First Things,

hence the wonderful and creative title of this podcast, The Editor's Desk.

And I'd like to welcome Daryl Paul, professor of political science at Williams College,

to the podcast to talk about his contribution to our Roe

Symposium under the title abortion in class. Welcome, Daryl. Thank you. Rusty. I'm really glad

to be here and thanks for the invitation. Your piece discusses really the political economy, maybe is the way we described, the political economy of our abortion debates in America.

And explain to the listeners the class disparities, which are quite striking, the class disparities in attitudes towards abortion.

So in terms of attitudes, the surveys, you can find these kinds of surveys all over the place.

I think the data that I use in the piece is Gallup data and maybe some Pew data as well. It shows pretty clearly that if we

define class by educational attainment, which is at least the easiest way to define it because we have

lots of data for that. The higher you go up the education ladder, the more pro-abortion, or maybe

we would better say pro-abortion rights, one is in the lower down

the education scale, it's quite the opposite. So in terms of attitudes, at least, the most

pro-life class in America is the working class, and the least pro-life class is the most highly

educated professional class. Right, but as's as is the case in so many

other areas of the transformations of our society since the 1960s, the people hire up on the

social ladder are in fact less likely to procure abortions than people that are lower on the latter.

I think as an enduax, her line is that the progressive elite talk the talk of the 60s,

but they walk the walk of the 50s.

So how does this play out in the question of the use or recourse to abortion?

No, it's an exactly right statement that you gave from Amy Wax, and lots of people have

noticed this, and I think you yourself and some of your writings have noticed this.

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