Mapping Moral Landscapes: Cartographies of Ascent and Descent in the Narratives of Pro-Life Activists

The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought to the fore of public consciousness in the United States two dominant stances on the issue of abortion (i.e. pro-life and pro-choice), each organized around a rhetoric of moral vilification. As the sites of abortion practice, abortion clinics have since become theatres of contention, where conflicting imaginings of agency, reproduction, and personhood take shape and are experienced. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between morality, place, and imaginative practice in the narratives of pro-life activists working at the doors of Affiliated Medical Services, a women’s health clinic providing abortions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Discourse about abortion experiences and activisms is treated reflexively as landscape talk – talk of how places are culturally recruited to stake out the values, histories, and identities of the individuals who occupy them. This paper argues that to better understand this process, there is a need to investigate how talk temporally and spatially located in the lived landscape is rooted in the imaginative landscape. How is abortion imaginatively rendered in talk? An answer to this question is approached by adopting Randall Lake’s (1984) heuristic model of an ascent-descent structure of moral discourse

Hormonal and Morphological Aspects of Growth and Sexual Maturation in Wild-Caught Male Vervet Monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops pygerythrus)

Knowledge of baseline changes in testosterone (T) and other androgens is central to both investigations of morphological, physiological, and behavioral correlates of inter-individual variation in the timing and shape of key events and transitions over the life course and questions of the evolution of species-specific schedules of maturation in primates. T represents an important determinant of spermatogenesis in male mammals and plays a central role in the expression of male sexual behavior and the development of secondary sex characteristics. This research integrates hormonal and morphometric methods to determine age-related changes in fecal testosterone (fT) metabolites and morphological markers of sexual maturation, including testicular volume, body mass (measured as BMI), and canine length, over the life course in a cross-sectional sample (n = 56) of wild-caught South African male vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops pygerythrus). Contrary to expectations of this study, T was not significantly associated with age (p = 0.1316 by ANOVA). However, BMI (p = 0.00022) and testis volume (p = 4.335e-06) were strongly related to age, corresponding to the eruption of the canine teeth at adolescence (3-4 years of age). These results strongly suggest the existence of an adolescent growth spurt in male vervets. An interpretation of activation of the development of these maturational markers in preparation for challenges encountered at reproductive maturity, including dispersal and reproduction, is tentatively adopted here following Jolly and Phillips-Conroy (2003, 2006). However, future longitudinal observations to determine changes within individuals are necessary to provide greater confidence in this interpretation

The static allometry of sexual and non-sexual traits in vervet monkeys

Sexual traits vary tremendously in static allometry. This variation may be explained in part by body size-related differences in the strength of selection. We tested this hypothesis in two populations of vervet monkeys, using estimates of the level of condition dependence for different morphological traits as a proxy for body size-related variation in the strength of selection. In support of the hypothesis, we found that the steepness of allometric slopes increased with the level of condition dependence. One trait of particular interest, the penis, had shallow allometric slopes and low levels of condition dependence, in agreement with one of the most consistent patterns yet detected in the study of allometry, namely that of genitalia exhibiting shallow allometries.This research was supported by NIH grant R01RR0163009

Data from: The static allometry of sexual and non-sexual traits in vervet monkeys

Sexual traits vary tremendously in static allometry. This variation may be explained in part by body size-related differences in the strength of selection. We tested this hypothesis in two populations of vervet monkeys, using estimates of the level of condition dependence for different morphological traits as a proxy for body size-related variation in the strength of selection. In support of the hypothesis, we found that the steepness of allometric slopes increased with the level of condition dependence. One trait of particular interest, the penis, had shallow allometric slopes and low levels of condition dependence, in agreement with one of the most consistent patterns yet detected in the study of allometry, namely that of genitalia exhibiting shallow allometries

Rodriguez et al BJLS vervet allometry trait types

Allometric slopes and condition dependence values by trait categor