Forging a New Consensus.(Column)

"The bottom line is no woman is going to want an abortion after seeing a sonogram."

Francesco Angelo, the medical director of Family Planning Center in Mineola, New York, quoted in the February 24, 2002, New York Times

"Society is like a Calder mobile. Touch it here, it trembles over there. Beliefs, habits, mores, dispositions are connected to one another in subtle ways and are related to behavior in many ways. Many of the ways are not known - - cannot be known - - until a chain of changes has begun."

George Will, "Statecraft as Soulcraft"

"We are a much more fetally aware society than we were when Roe came down."

Prof. David J. Garrow, a "scholar of the abortion rights movement," as quoted in the January 21, 2001, New York Times

Partly out of a sincere desire to get a handle on the cultural reference points of incoming freshmen, and partly, I assume, for fun, every year the faculty at the University of Beloit in Wisconsin surveys the incoming class. What they don't know, of course, is far more interesting for the over-30 set than what they're familiar with.