Amanda Jean Stevenson

@amandajean.bsky.social

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Sociologist and demographer at CU Boulder. Never repping coauthors or institutions or anything like that.

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Amanda Jean Stevenson

"Infant deaths increased after Texas banned abortion in early pregnancy" New piece in @statnews.bsky.social covers the new paper published in JAMA by @alisongemmill.bsky.social and team, and also quotes @amandajean.bsky.social Read now: www.statnews.com/2024/06/24/t...

Infant deaths increased after Texas banned abortion in early pregnancywww.statnews.com Since Texas’ ban on abortion went into effect, infant deaths in the state increased by nearly 13%, according to a new analysis published on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

The stupid definitions of intelligence baked into “AI” should make it and its boosters laughingstocks.

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Amanda Jean Stevenson

Come for quotes from me, stay for Lyman Stone saying you gotta hand it to Ceaușescu www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Elon Wants You to Have More Babieswww.bloomberg.com Musk, father of at least 12, has been quietly buying mainstream respectability for fringe theories about a coming population collapse.

Never ever forget that things can fucking *change*

New injection is 100% successful at preventing HIVwww.cnbc.com

"Wrongful embryonic death" is a moral and a statistical nightmare. If we'd spent the past half-century studying pregnancy in earnest maybe we'd know more about miscarriage, but as it stands we don't even have reliable estimates of baseline rates.

Will embryonic personhood provide grounds for suing coal fired power plant operators or am I doing this wrong?

Early Pregnancy Loss in an Era of “Wrongful Embryonic Death”jamanetwork.com This Viewpoint examines the possible legal consequences of pregnancy loss following the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision to extend personhood to

Will embryonic personhood provide grounds for suing coal fired power plant operators or am I doing this wrong?

Our digital traces will allow giant vacuums to plagiarize our personal forms of suffering as well as our original thoughts and work, I guess?

Feeling *very* bummed about craploads-of-wasteful-logistic-regression being built into the apps and operating systems I use every day, but so far not bummed enough to go back to dumping out my time messing with Linux.

This is just lazy laundering of the idea that liberalism is cultural hegemony.

I read this and am utterly perplexed. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/o... [gift link]

Opinion | The Success Narratives of Liberal Life Leave Little Room for Having Childrenwww.nytimes.com Progressives need to stop thinking of family as a conservative hobbyhorse.

Treating ordinal variables like they’re interval ratio is a way to lie.

Every year or so, a thinkpiece comes along that tries to convince people that, actually, the Supreme Court isn’t as out of control that those hysterical liberals make it out to be. With graphs and empirical tools and such. This is the latest version of that. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Opinion | Using Math to Analyze the Supreme Court Reveals an Intriguing Patternwww.politico.com The conservative wing isn’t always aligned, and that leads to some surprising outcomes.

Trans hate manifesting as a demand to be permitted to radically enforcement of gender norms is just so on-brand here.

And here's the near-identical declaration from UT Austin's John Hatfield—who, like Bonevac, also demands the right to discriminate against "transvestites," and refuses to use "they" as a singular pronoun. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

As a person whose job it was to calculate these costs and then got a PhD in how we calculate these costs, I absolutely agree.

The common argument in eg the econ literature is that these children require larger investment of public funds. I think we can all agree on this one: fuck you! I want my taxes supporting kids! It's not like bombing Rafah is a better use!

Stigmatizing some people’s fertility by calling it “teen birth” and arguing it ruins communities and people’s lives (which it clearly doesn’t) has unsurprisingly been associated with big changes. But those changes were also already underway! Saying all of that is a “good” thing is a real choice.

That's wrong, it's well understood. The confusion occurs when people think "teen births" are a thing (because of conservative propaganda). Trrn births are not a thing. They are just women, and they're having babies at older ages than in the past. familyinequality.wordpress.com/2023/06/03/p...

Please stop talking about teen birthsfamilyinequality.wordpress.com Teen births are a myth. They are not a social phenomenon. They are just births to women in their teenage years.

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Amanda Jean Stevenson

More eugenics on my feed today: here’s the Economist worrying that baby bonuses might encourage the ‘wrong’ kind of women to have kids (“focusing on young and poor women as a group would be bad for them and for society”) www.economist.com/leaders/2024...

Why paying women to have more babies won’t workwww.economist.com Economies must adapt to baby busts instead

I strongly support this call for journalists covering these folks to push back against the unsupported “data driven” claims these sort of folks make. Also TW: violence against a small child.

Once again begging journalists to talk to demographers when writing articles about demography. This piece repeatedly states that pronatalists are ‘data-driven’, yet allows their statement that low fertility will result in ‘countries of old people starving to death’ to pass by unchallenged

America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’www.theguardian.com Elon Musk (father of 11) supports their cause. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children. But are they reall...

Arguing inflation isn't that bad actually: Being measure-of-central-tendency-pilled

The fact that these stories never mention the decades of very serious harassment abortion scholars have endured tells you something.

This. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Harassment of scientists is surging — institutions aren’t sure how to helpwww.nature.com As researchers increasingly face many kinds of attack over their work, there is debate about how to support and protect them. As researchers increasingly face many kinds of attack over their work, the...

Any advice about how to talk to senior colleagues who think that social science research needs to get into LLMs or "AI" methods? I find it so hard to be anything but contemptuous.

Justifying something called pregnancy.gov on the basis that we have too few babies is just so gross - how is this not mortifying?

The second paragraph of the press release on Katie Britt’s anti-abortion sorta-pregnancy registry bill is literally just a statement that the US TFR is low. www.britt.senate.gov/news/press-r...

U.S. Senators Katie Britt, Marco Rubio, Kevin Cramer Introduce MOMS Act to Help Build Culture of Life, Support Women, Strengthen Families - Senator Katie Brittwww.britt.senate.gov WASHINGTON, D.C., May 9, 2024 — Ahead of Mother’s Day this Sunday, U.S. Senators Katie Britt (R-Ala.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Kevin Cramer (R-N.Dak.) today are introducing the More Opportunities fo...

The second paragraph of the press release on Katie Britt’s anti-abortion sorta-pregnancy registry bill is literally just a statement that the US TFR is low. www.britt.senate.gov/news/press-r...

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Amanda Jean Stevenson

Mask wearing for health protection is not just for "granny in a wheelchair" as one NC public official put it. Many people of all ages have underlying conditions, which are not the business of politicians, police or anyone.

Abortion rights advocacy without police abolition is increasingly irrelevant.

Senate bill would classify abortion pills as controlled dangerous substances in Louisianawww.wwno.org Louisiana lawmakers advanced a bill to add mifepristone and misoprostol to the list of controlled substances in the state.

Changing our public policies is impossible, so women must carry, birth, and raise at least two babies apiece on average

Opinion | The only real fix to Social Security’s problems? More babies.www.washingtonpost.com Without enough new workers to support us, we can’t all spend decades in retirement.

This is just a small part of "positive eugenics," the increasingly popular idea that we should encourage people to have more (and "better") babies.

It’s Illegal in Most of the World. In America, New Parents Are Embracing It—for Better or Worse.slate.com Little girls are better than little boys, some parents have decided—and they're acting on it.

It's not any single person's fault that the world is hateful and broken, but how we navigate it - that's on us. This piece beautifully articulates some of how our navigation can hurt others in ways most people choose to ignore.

Especially at a moment when abortion access is so existentially threatened, this conversation makes people extremely anxious. Avoiding it doesn't make the problem go away. One article can't hit every single point, but this is well-grounded.

Liberals and conservatives are united in hating anti-war protesters, tech has gotten high on its own supply, and all the cool kids are effusive about an obscure music industry guy: It's 2002.

I've had several friends break down crying when I reacted joyfully to the news that their kid told them they're trans. Apparently a common reaction is concern for the parents?! Truly, truly fuck this idea that parents are entitled to their imagined versions of their children's futures.

Was speaking with someone about the "grief" some parents express for the person they thought their trans kid was going to grow into and revisited this 2019 NYT piece by Meredith Talusan--just shocked at how hard it is to imagine them publishing something as thoughtful and nuanced today

Florida's six-week ban makes Puerto Rico the closest place to get abortion care for *millions* of people. Puerto Rico has an abortion fund you can support! secure.givelively.org/donate/profa...

secure.givelively.org

I became a professor because I love students - I love helping people do the scary, hard work it takes to learn. How can we come back from this aggression to become places where we can do that work again? Honestly, how?

They've got to amp GRT rhetoric precisely because our own experience is a great counterexample to all the baby bust handwringing.