Rueing Roe?

Yet another analysis indicating that abortion is doing more harm to the Democrats than good.

In the new issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Phillip Longman of the liberal New America Foundation has a fascinating essay on demographics and politics--the gist of which is that differing reproductive patterns are likely to make Western societies, including the U.S., more conservative.

One reason may actually be demographics. People who reject abortion tend to out-breed those who engage in it. This results in a Darwinian selective pressure that favors conservatives.

Patriarchy [which Longman defines not in the crude feminist sense of men dominating women but as "a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station"] does not necessarily sustain itself, Longman acknowledges; both men and women may be put off by the restrictions it imposes on their freedom. Yet freedom – in this context meaning sex divorced from obligation – appears to be self-limiting, at least over a span of generations.