How Mismatch Hurts The Minority Students It Is Supposed To Help
From the WaPo's Volokh Conspiracy blog, by Richard Sander:
The "mismatch hypothesis" contends that any person (certainly not just minorities) can be adversely affected if she attends a school where her level of academic preparation is substantially lower than that of her typical classmate. The idea was advanced in the mid-1960s, not in the context of affirmative action; it has been a subject of empirical research for about 20 years, with a sharp uptick in the sophistication of that research just in the last five.
I am for helping students who are poor but able to attend college, but it is unfair to qualified students to say no to them and to admit unqualified students who don't meet the standards. It also ultimately ends up doing harm to minority students admitted to a college they aren't prepared for, explain Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., in The Atlantic:
Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively -- even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.We refer to this problem as "mismatch," a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.
The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference -- sometimes because of a student's athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student's race -- that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace designed for him -- they are teaching to the "middle" of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best-prepared student.
The student who is underprepared relative to others in that class falls behind from the start and becomes increasingly lost as the professor and his classmates race ahead. His grades on his first exams or papers put him at the bottom of the class. Worse, the experience may well induce panic and self-doubt, making learning even harder.
When explaining to friends how academic mismatch works, we sometimes say: Think back to high school and recall a subject at which you did fine but did not excel. Suppose you had suddenly been transferred into an advanced class in that subject with a friend who was about at your level and 18 other students who excelled in the subject and had already taken the intermediate course you just skipped. You would, in all likelihood, soon be struggling to keep up. The teacher might give you some extra attention but, in class, would be focusing on the median student, not you and your friend, and would probably be covering the material at what, to you, was a bewildering pace.
Wouldn't you have quickly fallen behind and then continued to fall farther and farther behind as the school year progressed? Now assume that you and the friend who joined you at the bottom of that class were both black and everyone else was Asian or white. How would that have felt? Might you have imagined that this could reinforce in the minds of your classmates the stereotype that blacks are weak students?
...Of course, being surrounded by very able peers can confer benefits, too -- the atmosphere may be more intellectually challenging, and one may learn a lot from observing others. We have no reason to think that small preferences are not, on net, beneficial. But contemporary racial preferences used by selective schools -- especially those extended to blacks and Native Americans -- tend to be extremely large, often amounting to the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points.
At the University of Texas, whose racial preference programs come before the Supreme Court for oral argument on October 10, the typical black student receiving a race preference placed at the 52nd percentile of the SAT; the typical white was at the 89th percentile. In other words, Texas is putting blacks who score at the middle of the college-aspiring population in the midst of highly competitive students. This is the sort of academic gap where mismatch flourishes. And, of course, mismatch does not occur merely with racial preferences; it shows up with large preferences of all types.
By the way, Scalia, in discussing mismatch, was actually quoting one of the submitted briefs. Note the boldfaced bits in this quoting of his statement on this -- left out of most of the media reports:
There are there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that...most of the most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas...They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them...I'm just not impressed by the fact that that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And... I don't think it...stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible...
There's too much of this opportunistic attacking of people for remarks that weren't quite what they said.
From the Federalist link to the Scalia quote above, here's Clarence Thomas on the issue:
The University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched. But, as a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete. Setting aside the damage wreaked upon the self-confidence of these overmatched students, there is no evidence that they learn more at the University than they would have learned at other schools for which they were better prepared. Indeed, they may learn less.
I speak at an inner-city school from time to time -- just did my last session in October. And I also sometimes see the kind of preparation privileged kids get in LA -- some of whom are not white -- due to some friends in the education biz (among them, a private tutor). These privileged kids are vastly, vastly more prepared than even the honors students at the inner city high school. I just can't see the kids I speak to competing at elite colleges. You don't do them a favor by letting them in. You do quite the contrary.
This isn't to say they're dumb. They're just not going to be able to compete at the level of, say, students at the University of Michigan. However, maybe by going to a community college, or less prestigious state school, they could learn study methods and get help and go to a more prestigious school two years in -- while saving a fuckton of money.
One of my former assistants, a first-generation American, did this. She went to Santa Monica Community College, did well, and ended up getting a free ride to Northwestern. From what I understand, Santa Monica College gives a pretty good education.
Uh.. First generation American?
Sixclaws at December 13, 2015 7:36 AM
If you continue the preferences thru school you also don't do them any favors. Most of us end up in the private economy. So eventually you have to produce. At some point the supports go away.
Personally I hate working with black male engineers. Due to the desire to avoid lawsuits companies that can pay more do for competent black engineers. So you end up with the same mismatch phenomenon in business. Any black male engineer that is equally as competent as me is far more valuable due to the lawsuit protection. So any black males I work with either soon move on to a higher paid position at another company or are significantly less competent.
I was specific about the gender for a reason. I love working with black female engineers. As far as I can tell the US AA community hates it's women working in engineering, but is ok with men in engineering. This community gender bias tends to eliminate any black female who isn't really passionate about engineering. Consequently every black female engineer I've worked with has been exceptional.
Ben at December 13, 2015 8:12 AM
Uh.. First generation American?
In her family. Other than she and her siblings, those in her family were all born overseas. Including her grandma, who lived with them.
Amy Alkon at December 13, 2015 9:25 AM
http://immigration.about.com/od/glossary/f/How-Is-First-generation-Immigrant-Defined.htm
Amy Alkon at December 13, 2015 9:27 AM
The WaPo absolutely crucified Scalia this AM; had an article about whether it's possible to impeach a sitting justice.
roadgeek at December 13, 2015 9:54 AM
Two questions:
1. Is it possible that a mismatched student at an elite college is still better off than he would be at a school he's more suited for, due to the connections he can make and the luster of the name? (When I was working, potential employers were impressed by where I went to school, long before they had any idea whether or not I did well.)
2. If mismatched students would indeed be better off at different colleges, where are the high school guidance counselors in all this? Shouldn't they be helping kids pick colleges at which they can succeed?
Rex Little at December 13, 2015 12:09 PM
I think it's one thing to know you're under-prepared but quite another to assume that you're special and brilliant because you got good grades at your crummy school. I went to an Ivy from a decent large public high school, and I just assumed that everyone else would be smarter and more advanced than I was, so I worked super hard my first year, and then realized I wasn't as behind as I thought I was.
But being the valedictorian at a bottom rung LAUSD high school means you might not have to take remedial English.
KateC at December 13, 2015 2:40 PM
The point everyone is missing, is that college stopped being about education, a long time ago. It is an expensive form of signaling that you have acquired centain credentials.
It was the goal of affirmative action, not to give minorities a good education that would result in them being productive citizens, but instead to give them credentials that would make them indistinguishable from those who had gotten a good education, so that a racial bias in hiring based on those credentials could be readily identified, and punished by the government.
Isab at December 13, 2015 3:24 PM
Mis-match is relevant not only to minorities. When choosing colleges and then grad school, I did not go for the hardest school that would accept me, but the one where I thought I could do best. Big fish in medium pond seemed better to me, and I was right.
Craig Loehle at December 13, 2015 5:28 PM
KateC: "I think it's one thing to know you're under-prepared but quite another to assume that you're special and brilliant because you got good grades at your crummy school."
Yeah. When I went to college in my late 30's one of my clinical instructors, Dr. J***, often admonished me because my two daughters, aged 15 and 16, had never gone to school (except that they were both attending a community college at the time). She said I was depriving them of "a lot of education and opportunities.
She bragged about her gifted 17-year-old, high school senior daughter who was in advanced placement classes, had won awards in various writing and speaking competitions, was well prepared to attend a prestigious university, and was on her way to fulfilling her dream of a career as some kind of writer.
A year later my then-17-year-old was graduating from her community college with one of the three highest GPA's in her class. She was well prepared with her record of success at setting and pursuing her own educational goals, experience tutoring Asian and Russian students in biology and English (for which their parents were willing to pay her nicely), experience working as a paid tutor in the computer science lab at the college, volunteer work teaching English to Russian immigrants, and some very generous scholarships, to enter as a junior the private university she chose and graduated from two years later (in her graduating class there were about 40 other home schooled 19-22 year olds, including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Whites and a Samoan girl)
I admit that after more than a year of enduring Dr. J***'s admonitions about depriving my daughters I felt a bit of schadenfreude when she told me her daughter had not been accepted at the universities she applied to, and was required to take remedial math and English classes at a nearby, mediocre state university. And I did feel a little smug when she asked me for advice about how to withdraw her 10-year-old son from the public school and direct his education from home.
Sorry to bore you all with bragging about my girls, but I'm so glad we didn't allow them to be educated by "professional educators" and "experts". I think Dr. J***'s daughter would have had a head start in the pursuit of her dreams and happiness if she had been educated as though she were the bright, unique individual that she is, instead of being institutionalized and educated as part of some homogeneous batch for the first 18 years of her life (daycare through high school)
Ken R at December 13, 2015 5:49 PM
Isab: "It was the goal of affirmative action, not to give minorities a good education that would result in them being productive citizens, but instead to give them credentials that would make them indistinguishable from those who had gotten a good education..."
That's a good point, and probably also applies to "no child left behind" high school diplomas, self esteem-supporting grade point averages, and admissions to colleges and universities.
Ken R at December 13, 2015 5:55 PM
Rex; if I might answer part of your questions...
Yes, a student might be better off with a resume listing a school with more "panache." But, that would only be if they graduated. I'll assume, by your example about yourself, that you did graduate. Also, depending on the profession, GPA may or may not be asked for on applications.
Second, if they do graduate, but just barely, all their connections won't do them a world of good if they didn't learn enough to make it in their chosen profession. (Politics seems to be an exception - Obama is the ultimate incompetent affirmative-action kid).
Those connections will not be willing to risk their own reputation if they know/find out that the mismatched student/classmate can't do the work. So, maybe, they might get a first reference; but, nothing after that.
And, guess what? When they don't get anything else after school they will be convinced that it is due to bigotry; not their own incompetence. After all, everyone has been telling them how great and wonderful they are, they even went to Harvard! So that they cannot keep a job must be due to racial/ethnic/class bias! (again, Obama is a classic example - anyone daring to criticize him is called a racist. It can't possibly be because Obama is an idiot.)
Third, those that do get ahead (as Clarence Thomas put it many, many, years ago) others will think that it has little to do with their capabilities and more to do with affirmative action - they only got to where they are because of special breaks they have been given ("affirmative action" - a privilege that the left doesn't want to acknowledge). That doesn't help those who truly are good at what they do.
As for the high school guidance counselors helping to steer them to the right fit school. Yep, they should be doing that. But, what would anyone think of any guidance counselor who told a student (any student - no matter the race, gender or economic class): "Yes, you got accepted into Harvard or Yale; but, you won't do well there. It would be better if you went to the state school." I think I smell a lawsuit coming from that conversation; in the very least, that guidance counselor would lose his/her job for such an "insensitive" comment.
Also, it helps the high school if they have more students go to "better" colleges than not; even if the students flunk out - hey, at least "we" (the high school) got them there! High Schools don't, as far as I know, keep track of how many of the graduates graduate college. They just keep track of how many get accepted into college.
This mismatch in higher education is a conversation that, in my opinion, is long overdue. But, I just see that the left and the race hustlers will shout down anyone who dares to try to discuss it rationally.
Seriously, the local community college in my county has a 50% freshman rate taking remedial English and Math - stuff they should have learned in high school; but for some reason didn't.
If anyone dared to suggest that these students shouldn't even be in college (even community college) they would be called all sorts of names. So, what does the school do? Just accept them and put them into remedial classes when their academic work isn't up to the standards.
Some of the students are still taking remedial classes in their third year of school! The school benefits from the student loan money they get and they look good in the public eye because of their acceptance rate. The public believes that they are doing good by supporting a college that "takes anybody." Everyone gets something except the student who can't do the work. That student gets a loan that they have trouble paying back and no job prospects because they can't finish the community college degree program.
charles at December 13, 2015 6:02 PM
I dunno, there's a range at Harvard, it is not just super geniuses. Some legacy kids and sports scholarship types (yes there are some, surprisingly enough) aren't the brightest bulbs.
NicoleK at December 13, 2015 11:47 PM
My own story: I was in private schools from the second grade until my parents divorced. Then I spent 2-1/2 years in public schools where I made straight A's while basically doing nothing (they had me, at the age of 11, tutoring other students). The problem with that was, my education came to a standstill; I wasn't progressing.
So in the eighth grade, I get admitted to a private school. And they put me on the high-speed track; I started out taking algebra right off the bat. Holy crap. I was waaaaay behind. My grades plummeted. My parents were unhappy. The school was unhappy. I started to think of myself as stupid. It wasn't until my sophomore year that I started to get some help. A physics teacher took me aside and told me that he thought my exam results were odd; he said, "you get some hard stuff right but then you miss some easy stuff." I told him what had happened, and he realized that I had skipped the classes where some fundamentals I needed were taught. He told me, "The school makes us use this textbook, but here's a better one", and he loaned me a textbook from his private collection. I studied it and things started to make a lot more sense.
But it wasn't until the end of my junior year that I was fully caught up with my classmates. I aced my senior year and racked up credits on AP exams, but the damage to my transcript was already done. I would liked to have gone to MIT, but I knew I didn't have the qualifications. Purdue and Georgia Tech turned me down. I was admitted to a state school, where I aced and got a degree in my technical field. I wouldn't trade the experience now for anything, but I do wonder where I'd be today if I had gotten admitted to one of those better known schools.
Cousin Dave at December 14, 2015 7:58 AM
Another thing I will throw in is that it has been my observation that wherever you find poor people, you will find anti-intellectualism. Now, I'm not talking about being opposed to the class that today calls itself our intellectual elite; that's entirely rational. I'm talking about the attitude that holds that basic learning and study is blasphemous in some fashion. In the ghetto, they call it "acting white"; in the sticks it's "puttin' on airs", but it's the same thing. Whenever someone in that culture wants to better themselves, the other lobsters try to drag them back into the pot. There used to be a lot of support among the greater society that counteracted this and helped people who wanted to escape that culture pull themselves out, but that's gone now. Over the past decade I've had the experience of seeing it happen to both a relative and to someone who was once a close friend; people who were once bright and promising fell back into that culture that they came from and abandoned their aspirations, instead choosing to become dependents.
Cousin Dave at December 14, 2015 8:06 AM
"... I do wonder where I'd be today if I had gotten admitted to one of those better known schools."
Probably in the exact same place CD. You say you are in a technical field. And for those the school doesn't make that much of a difference. The Google guys wrote some interesting things about this. Top couple percent from MIT was no different from the top couple percent from any state school. The median graduate was significantly different. But that could mostly be accounted for by the entrance criteria.
Of course, the key part of all of this is graduating.
Ben at December 14, 2015 8:47 AM
I'm not talking about being opposed to the class that today calls itself our intellectual elite; that's entirely rational.
__________________________________________________
Why is it rational? Aside from being opposed to any individuals who make a point of being snobbish and/or acting as though real-life experience counts for little? (Offhand, I can't think of any names of such snobs.)
lenona at December 14, 2015 9:40 AM
It's rational Lenona because they call themselves our intellectual elite. For one they usually aren't that intellectual.
The climate change stuff is a great example. Al Gore isn't that smart. He actually got worse grades in school than Bush. But he likes to pretend he is an intellectual elite.
For two, culture usually trumps scholastic intelligence.
The willingness of the intellectual elite to lie in order to do 'what is good for you' is well documented as well. From Grubberizing to the Syrian immigrant issue these elites say one thing and are actually doing another.
Ben at December 14, 2015 9:45 AM
"(Offhand, I can't think of any names of such snobs.)"
Here's a favorite Exhibit A: John Kerry. He earned money and power the old-fashioned way -- he married into it. He's had a number of high positions in the U.S. government, and in all of them he has consistently exhibited an intellectual incuriousity and little understanding of the issues that he was supposed to be dealing with. He over-estimates his own abilities; a textbook example of the Gell-Mann effect. He's also a bad liar. His stories about his military service are wildly improbable (e.g., the CIA agent with the magic hat). When he was caught docking his yacht in Rhode Island to dodge New Hampshire taxes, at a time when he was advocating luxury tax increases, he had an unlikely story about how it was necessary for him to do that because terrorism.
Cousin Dave at December 14, 2015 12:37 PM
Well, of course it's highly immodest to CALL oneself an intellectual - but unless you can prove that Gore or others (name them) does just that, I don't see how one can just automatically oppose them.
lenona at December 14, 2015 12:40 PM
Political action committees provide those descriptions while advancing their candidate. Isn't necessary for the candidate to declare themselves intelligent…
Radwaste at December 14, 2015 2:11 PM
of course it's highly immodest to CALL oneself an intellectual - but unless you can prove that Gore or others (name them) does just that, I don't see how one can just automatically oppose them.
Posted by: lenona at December 14, 2015 12:40 PM
Anytime you hold yourself out as a scientific authority on something that you have neither the chops, or the education to be an authority on, you fall into the Intellectural, and intellectually dishonest class.
Gore has done this is spades with Global Warming. A poli sci Major, and a very average one, at that. He knows nothing about science, research or evidence.
Isab at December 14, 2015 2:42 PM
I'm curious Lenona. If there are no intellectual elites in America (as you claim) then why is there any issue with opposing this non-existent group?
Ben at December 14, 2015 3:09 PM
I DIDN'T claim that - I'm just saying that just because you don't like someone's opinions doesn't mean you get to label that person a pseudointellectual or a snob.
Not to mention that you don't always have to be an expert on something to have some basic sense about the topic. (Yes, I know this is useful to both sides in a debte.)
Example:
"You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table: it is not your trade to make tables."
-Samuel Johnson.
At the same time, of course, "basic sense" doesn't mean whatever one wants to believe. If one don't do research of ANY kind on a subject, one can't expect to be taken seriously, any more than children who don't really know what they're talking about can expect that - even though it can be horribly frustrating for them to keep quiet when all the adults are talking about something the kids are passionate about - such as having kids spend fewer days in school.
"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."
- Edith Sitwell.
lenona at December 15, 2015 7:15 AM
I'm not the one labeling these people as intellectual elites Lenona. That is a major branding effort by the Democrat party and has been for decades. To be ignorant of this only shows you haven't paid any attention.
This is why I brought up Bush. No one claims Bush was an intellectual elite. To the contrary he was constantly lambasted as a barely literate moron. Calendars were published with stupid phrases he said for each day of the year. John Kerry and Al Gore were put up as the intellectual solution to our moronic leaders. Even Barack Obama is sold with that branding.
Mind, I'm not claiming Bush is some kind of genius. His school records are rather pathetic. But those put up as the intelligent alternative had even worse marks.
Ben at December 15, 2015 10:25 AM
"I'm just saying that just because you don't like someone's opinions doesn't mean you get to label that person a pseudointellectual or a snob."
Sometimes it's self-evident, though. To circle back to Al Gore, it's clear that he views science as a political process: if enough people "vote" for something to be true, then it is true, physical laws of the universe be damned. And as for the snob factor, if he actually believed his own global warming theories, one would thing that he would rearrange his own life to live according to those percepts. Not only has he not done so, but he is one of the foremost conspicuous consumers of energy in America. His house in Tennessee is known to rack up 22,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. That's about 10x what even a typical upper-middle-class house in America (one with electric heat, at that) consumes. I'm not even sure how it's possible to consume that much electricity in a residence without setting something on fire. And Gore's jet-setting, and consumption of jet fuel, is legendary. We won't even talk about the Triana satellite. As for John Kerry, during his Presidential campaign, he once visited KSC and tried to present himself as being an expert on the Space Shuttle. Did you ever see the Monty Python "Upper Class Twit of the Year" sketch? That's what we're dealing with here.
As a counter-example, I offer up James Carville. I do not like James Carville a bit; my opinions differ from his on nearly every issue, and I regard him as the sort of slimy political consultant that reduces the American public's faith in politics and government. But: on the topic of how to run a political campaign, Carville knows his stuff forwards and backwards. If he offers an opinion on how a campaign or an election is going, you'd better listen. And he's usually smart enough not to opine on topics that he knows little about.
Cousin Dave at December 15, 2015 3:54 PM
Maybe I should add that I would never assume that ANY politician is an intellectual, whether or not that person makes it to the White House. Even plenty of politicians don't understand politics.
When I hear of people attacking the "intellectual elite," I tend to assume they're attacking (mostly, anyway) scientists who are NOT politicians but who make somewhat unpopular statements with political implications. Richard Dawkins, for one.
lenona at December 16, 2015 9:31 AM
Oh, and remind me again as to which party these days tends to get accused of being anti-science?
lenona at December 16, 2015 9:35 AM
Forgot to say: Especially when it comes to things like allowing schools to teach evolution without the Christian "alternative" being included?
lenona at December 16, 2015 9:37 AM
Yes Lenona, the Republican party is constantly being called anti-science. Yes, they do have some anti-science views. But no more than the Democrats. Life begins at conception. Science has no question on this. It is in every biology book . . . unless you are a Democrat. Scientific consensus ring any bells? As CD points out, science is not a political process. I could go on.
Ben at December 16, 2015 6:42 PM
Also, Europe is where you really see technocratic and intellectual elitist governments. The first amendment effectively limits such things here in the US. When the emperor has no clothes we can say so.
Ben at December 16, 2015 6:44 PM
I doubt that any scientist who happens to be a Democrat tries to claim that a zygote or an embryo isn't alive. The argument is whether something that clearly cannot live outside the womb is a PERSON that deserves rights.
Not to mention that when it comes to, say, abandoned frozen embryos, precious few conservative women are willing to volunteer to "rescue" them. Maybe deep down, they don't really think of them as people? Or maybe they're worried about any unpredictable genetic flaws? Maybe they happen to be among the many conservative women who would immediately have an abortion if the doctor detected Down syndrome?
On top of that, why don't we hear (at least, I haven't) about church funerals for the results of miscarriages of WANTED pregnancies of, say, four months? Maybe that's because even though a brokenhearted woman feels that she's lost a baby, she senses in her gut that it's just not fair to equate herself to someone who's lost a two-year-old?
Finally: Abortifacient herbs have been used for centuries and still are (and yes, some are relatively safe to use). After all, if prostitution is the oldest profession, it stands to reason that those women would seek out every means to avoid becoming visibly pregnant, since that would likely be bad for business. BUT...there is no mention of abortion in the Bible. Pretty strange, no? Maybe it wasn't really considered a big deal back then?
lenona at December 17, 2015 3:47 PM
Thank you for proving my point Lenona.
Ben at December 17, 2015 5:56 PM
Explain, please?
lenona at December 19, 2015 12:39 PM
Look at your argument Lenona. You put Republican politicians as equivalent to Democrat professional biologists. Now, I may vote Republican most of the time, but I don't have that level of respect for them. As I said, the 'science' party is all advertising. Advertising you've bought.
As for the rest of your arguments, what are the statistics on 'conservative women' 'rescuing' zygotes? I have no idea what the percentages are. And the term 'rescue' is rather odd. Wouldn't it be bury? In both this paragraph and the next you conflate religious with conservative. The two are not synonyms. The religious do have funeral for both unwanted zygotes, miscarriages, and excess bread. The fact that you have never heard of this is irrelevant. Absence of proof is not proof of absences. Most of these services are very small, consisting of only the parents or the parents and the priest.
To match your finally, once again absence of proof is not proof of absence. That the bible doesn't speak directly about abortifacients only means the bible doesn't speak directly about abortifacients. It is in no way odd that the bible doesn't speak about abortion. If it wasn't a controversial subject 2000 years ago (and for the most part it wasn't) then there was no reason to write on the topic.
Ben at December 19, 2015 1:34 PM
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