"The Roe Effect"

A friend of mine just sent me James Taranto's remarkable article, "The Roe Effect" on how the right to abortion has diminished the number of Democratic voters since 1973, published in The Wall Street Journal's online editorial page, Opinion Journal (July 6, 2005). Here are a couple of paragraphs from the piece:

Compounding the GOP advantage is what I call 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. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. 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. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have.

If you have not yet read this, by all means do. It's full of pages of hard statistical data revealing the effect of political liberals literally aborting themselves out of office. (Gratia tibi, Chris Garton-Zavesky)