A recent poll reveals that while White Catholics sadly mirror national divisions on abortion, Hispanic and Latino Catholics paint a more complicated picture. Hispanic Catholics are the ethnic group least likely to support the legality of abortion, but drilling down into the data shows that Hispanic Catholics born outside the U.S. were far less likely to support the legality of abortion (59 per cent oppose abortion) than if they were born inside the U.S. In a political climate where it is simply assumed that Hispanic immigrants are a reliable voting block for Democrats, the data suggests that they are not natural allies of the party of Planned Parenthood. In America magazine, J.D. Long-García notes that because “Hispanics were the only race or ethnicity where a majority of respondents thought that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases,” Latino lawmakers find it difficult to represent their constituents in a party which supports abortion on demand. A woman who works on Latino parish engagement in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Ms. De Los Santos, explains that Hispanic Catholics “are more likely to identify as pro-family than as pro-life” because the family is the context for understanding the value and sanctity of life. “We grow up with our grandparents and take care of them until they die.” A strong sense of a large and extended family with real familial obligations shapes how they think about the legality of abortion. This is not to say that Hispanic women are not having abortions. They tragically are. But Raimundo Rojas, director of Latino Outreach for the National Right to Life notes in the same article that the stigma of abortion is far more pronounced in Hispanic communities. “It’s something that isn’t done...You can’t look at the Hispanic culture without dealing with telenovelas. Women who have abortions in telenovelas are the villains.” A strong moral disgust underwrites even Latino support for the legality of abortion. The conclusion drawn in America’s reporting on the data is commendable as far as it goes: immigration and abortion are both about human dignity, and are better bedfellows than partisan issues. That conclusion is, however, a political wish that seems distant from political reality. It also doesn’t help to explain why the Hispanic population stands out, in contrast to White Catholics, or why being born in America would become a solvent for those familial attachments that undergird their support for pro-life legislation. One possible explanation which moves in this direction, however, might be found in Mary Eberstadt’s new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The book is out next week, and presents a new approach to thinking about the collective “primal screams” of our identity politics as a scream “born of familial liquidation.” In a fascinating essay published this week at Quillette called “The Great Scattering,” Eberstadt previews her thesis that “our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial.” The inverse of that claim would be that where the micropolitics of the family still have a significant claim on people’s lives, they will be less drawn into the “primal screams” of identity that so distort our politics — including the politics of abortion. Eberstadt explains: