June 28, 2004
WHERE HAVE ALL THE LIBERALS GONE? (via Patricia Garnaas):
The Empty Cradle Will Rock: How abortion is costing the Democrats voters--literally. (LARRY L. EASTLAND, June 28, 2004, Wall Street Journal)
• Republicans have fewer abortions than their proportion of the population, Democrats have more than their proportion of the population. Democrats account for 30% more abortions than Republicans (49% vs. 35%).• The more ideologically Democratic the voters are (self-identified liberals), the more abortions they have. The more ideologically Republican the voters are (self-identified conservatives), the fewer abortions they have.
This isn't particularly surprising given the core constituencies of both political parties. But translating percentages into numbers for the purpose of evaluating their impact on politics makes the importance of these numbers real. It's one thing to quote percentages and statistics, it's quite another to look at actual human beings. For example:
• There are 19,748,000 Democrats who are not with us today. (49.37 percent of 40 million).
• There are 13,900,000 Republican who are not with us today. (34.75 percent of 40 million).
• By comparison, then, the Democrats have lost 5,848,000 more voters than the Republicans have.
These Missing Americans--and particularly the millions of Missing Voters--when compounded over time are of enormous political consequence... [...]
• Six out of 10 Americans call themselves conservatives. Only a quarter of them are having abortions.
• A little more than one-third of Americans call themselves liberals. More than four in 10 are having abortions.
• This means that liberals are having one third more abortions than conservatives.
This whole idea seemed mostly just a fun (if grim) way to annoy liberals when James Taranto started it, but those numbers are pretty compelling. One other factor to consider is gender selection abortion, which disfavors females, who tend to grow up to be considerably more liberal than males. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 28, 2004 9:48 AM
Another Democrat redoubt that is *way* over-represented in abortions: black women. IIRC black women represent about 12% of the population but have about 33% of the abortions.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at June 28, 2004 9:56 AMThis analysis ignores one important fact, and that is the populations are dynamic, not static. Had abortion been illegal all these years, there would have been FAR fewer pregancies.
The fact is that abortion is used as birth control, and absent the options, other forms of birth control would have dramatically reduced the 40 million number.
That said, the numbers are instructive in another way. The people who WERE having kids over these years are raising a more pro-life generation.
It's like compound interest.
Posted by: BB at June 28, 2004 10:30 AMThink of it as evolution in action.
It's evolution all right, but Spencerian, not Darwinian. Adaptive folkways, such as refraining from slaughtering one's offspring confer an evolutionary advantage for those folkways. Parents transmit culture to their children Hypertropic reproduction, how~~~~, substituting biological quantity for cultural quality is likewise counter-evolutionary--we're not fighting with pitchforks, you know.
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 28, 2004 12:22 PMGender selection abortion would be a factor in the US if a) it occurs, and b) has a net gender skew.
The indications are a), very rarely, and b) not.
A recent study looking for gender skew in sex selection fertility treatments shows the practice is used almost exclusively to balance families.
Posted by: at June 28, 2004 12:51 PMThe calculus is overly simplistic, and assumes that party affiliation is largely hereditary. It doesn't take into account the greater conservatism of the Boomer progeny over their parents, or the psychological effect of being the child of a parent that has aborted other children might have on a person's political outlook.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at June 28, 2004 1:15 PMIts an interesting theory to be sure, but I wonder what the real correlation of parental political affiliation is to offspring political affiliation. Clearly its less than 1 -- I myself am living proof of that.
Posted by: AML at June 28, 2004 2:12 PMWhat's the big deal?Democrats can import all the votes they need,ably supported by the likes of OJ and Stephen Greene.
Abort away!
Posted by: at June 28, 2004 3:19 PMThe irony would be amusing if the millions of deaths of innocent children weren't so tragic.
Posted by: MarkD at June 28, 2004 8:44 PMI also wonder if we are just assuming that gender selection plays no part in abortion choices because that would so run counter to the media's meme,and actually the whole country's meme, about how abortion only benefits women. Has anyone seen any study that has looked into whether or not this is going on? Also, any study that would simply ask a woman why she choose abortion probably would not be accurate, because in our culture no woman would own up to aborting a baby because it was a girl. It would have to show if the # of boys being born is larger, would be my guess. Or of women having abortions what percent go on to not abort male babies.
Posted by: Buttercup at June 28, 2004 9:41 PMWSJ's been calling this "The Roe Effect" for some time.
>Another Democrat redoubt that is *way* over-
>represented in abortions: black women. IIRC
>black women represent about 12% of the
>population but have about 33% of the abortions.
This dates back to Planned Parenthood's origin in the Eugenics Movement of the 1920s and 1930s --"Life to the Fit, Extinction to the Unfit! Only perfect seeds must be sown!"
Early PP put most of their abortion joints in black ghettos in an attempt to abort and contracept "the mud races" to extinction, leaving only the blond-haired, blue-eyed "fit" to inherit the earth. To this day, they are over-represented in non-white (non-Aryan?) communities.
Posted by: Ken at June 29, 2004 12:43 PM