James Taranto writes on what he calls "The Roe Effect" – abortion tends to decrease populations, and the decrease falls selectively on populations that favor abortion. The result is Republican (or at least conservative) victories on a national scale.
This is, by the way, a prime example of evolution in action.
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There are a couple of reasons why Republicans might benefit from Roe v. Wade. First of all, the Democrat Party has painted itself into a corner on abortion. It has found itself having to take stands that are not widely popular. The party arguing the other way has a much easier time of things.
One reason Republicans have an advantage is that as long as Roe remains in effect--taking off the table any restriction that imposes an "undue burden" on a woman seeking to abort her pregnancy--Republicans are an extreme antiabortion party only in theory. When it comes to actual legislation, the GOP favors only modest--and popular--regulations. The Democrats, on the other hand, must defend such unpopular practices as partial-birth abortion, taxpayer-subsidized abortion, and abortions for 13-year-olds without their parents' knowledge.
Although Republicans are extreme anti-abortion "only in theory", let it be noted that even very moderate restrictions on abortion are labeled "extreme anti abortion" by the leaders of the Democrat Party. When every parent who wants to know when a daughter is having surgery is being called an extremist, you will find that the "extremist" label doesn't work quite as well in shaping the ideas and voting patterns of at least those parents.
Then there's "The Roe Effect".
It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population.
And indeed, it appears they're not randomly distributed. Variations include:
- Black women have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women.
- Hispanic women have an abortion ratio that is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites.
- It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. (Remember, the genetic contribution found by that study in the news only accounted for some of a voter's choices.)
Darwin's theory of evolution is based on two very simple facts which combine to create a very powerful effect:
1) Living things differ from each other, often in random ways.
2) Differences often have a non-random effect on which living things live to reproduce.
The peppered moth experiments illustrated that a moth's color could have a significant effect on whether it lives to reproduce. If you weed out moths of one color over generations, that color will become very rare. (For the moment, we'll ignore arguments over the origins of new species and of life itself. Selection is so well established no one with two brain cells to rub together can deny it.)
If you have some environmental factor that decreases the number of people who vote for one party over another, then all things being equal, you're going to find that the population of voters for that party shrinks over time.
Needless to say, critics argue against such an effect. I personally find it very hard to make the case that there would be no effect.
Having an abortion early in life need not effect a woman's lifetime fertility, but I'd be willing to bet it does anyway. It should be possible to conduct a survey and find the correlation coefficient between number of abortions and number of living offspring. I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money it's negative.
Even if there is no correlation between abortions and ultimate family size, I'll note that each abortion is going to postpone childbirth by at least a few months. Since people become more conservative as they get older, all things being equal, each abortion means the children who are born will be born to more conservative parents.
A thoughtful researcher could probably find all manner of possible relationships between number of abortions and political outlook; I'll stop here.
I'll just leave you with this thought:
Roe v. Wade – Think of it as evolution in action.
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