Germany also still has 'Kirchensteur', you'd almost think the two have something to do with each other, after all, a country where the government will happily collect the tithe for churches quite possibly has a large religious influence on its politics.

Some other countries also still have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

And the sooner it dies out the better.

Europe might be more progressive on abortion. Ever notice the rhetoric on the "rare" part of "safe, legal and rare" is entirely limited to preventing unwanted pregnancies? Presumably abortions should be rare because they are intrinsically bad in some way. We use the tax system to influence all kind of behaviors, many of them health related, but we're not willing to use the tax system to make abortions more rare...

Using the tax system to discourage abortions must be the worst idea I ever heard.

Why? We discourage smoking with the tax system. And I'm not talking about a regressive tax, like on smoking. It can be purely for rich healthy women.

If abortion should be rare, than why not tax it.

Abortion should be rare the same way that heart surgery should be rare: not by stoping people from having one when they need it, but by preventing the unwanted condition (unwanted pregnancy, heart disease) in the first place.

People who say that abortion should be rare aren't saying that the procedure itself is bad. They're saying that unwanted pregnancies are bad.

Wow! I always thought the "rare" part was added because what happens to the fetus is, let's say, unsavory. Now I see it's one of those genius phrases where you can read your own feelings into it.

Whatever your feelings about it are, you can safely assume that most people who say "safe, legal, and rare" are saying that the state should have no role at all in women's reproductive choices. It's a pro-choice slogan, coined by pro-choice activists.

I think we're all a lot better off not getting any further into the details on this.

I don't think a purely legal view is a sensible way to look at this. In much of Europe, abortion is not a major political issue that motivates the voting patterns of a significant chunk of the electorate and hasn't been for a long time. In that sense, Europe is more progressive on women's reproductive rights.

That's a strange way to present the argument. In the early 1800s the electorate of the US South was unified in support of slavery. Not a motivating political issue. I would not say the south was particularly progressive on the issue of slavery.

You're reading what I wrote as some sort of weird 'therefore, Socrates was a cat' syllogism. Was the point I was trying to make unclear? Because I don't see how your analogy is at all related or even much of an analogy.

FWIW my reading of your comment was the same as tedunangst's. Perhaps you meant something different from what you wrote?

I don't see how "people don't care" -> "they are progressive". The logic of that escapes me.