The rate of pregnancies ended by abortion has been dropping drastically, now reaching the lowest point since 1975, In short, there haven’t been fewer abortions per capita since shortly after abortion was legalized by Roe v. Wade

in 1973. This should surprise no one.

It is data like this that brings to the fore the inherent problem for those who advocate abortion rights. Abortion rights supporters and Shakers are brethren in the path to their own extinction. In simple terms, the Roe Effect explains that those likely to support abortion rights in the future are those aborted today. As the sociological data reliably shows that children tend to mirror the political tendencies of their parents, it is only natural that the cessation of reproduction by a particular political strata would have longterm electoral effects. Because of Roe v. Wade, there are approximately 40 million likely Democrat-inclined voters who never had the opportunity to exist. As the vast majority of women who seek abortions are Democrats, the eventual effect, from congressional redistricting and representation to actual voting practices, will result in a slow population trend away from the more ardent liberal views mired in an unrestrained advocacy of abortion-on-demand of the Democrat Party to the more reasonable and moderate views of the mainstream Republican Party.

It is this self-imposed dearth of future voters that has already cost Democrats in a variety of ways. James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal has been one of the foremost advocates explaining the results

of the Roe Effect

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.

There certainly is an identifiable effect of a particular political group’s proclivity to have more abortions. The degree of the effect, admittedly, is up for debate. No absolute answer can be determined because it’s relatively hard to poll the political tendencies of those who never existed. However, to say the Roe Effect may have swung a few hundred votes in Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 is well within the realm of believability. Congress? Who knows. The actual influence on policy by lost Roe Effect votes is likely dwarfed by the loss of new congressional seats in Democrat friendly regions.

So, in a perverse sort of way, Republican efforts to minimize abortions actually help Democrats win future elections. With enemies like us, you don’t need friends.

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They are as follows

From the Supreme Court, the guests are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.

I was going to make an abortion crack, but Kennedy slipped through.

There was a discussion going on blogs several weeks ago concerning the right of men to have a say in the abortion decision.  I’ve been meaning to write on the subject since first reading the arguments, but am just getting around to it now.

I start with the premise that Roe v. Wade is the accepted law of the land.  Whether or not that ruling is appropriate is a whole other argument.  That being said …

I believe a husband/boyfriend/random sexual partner should have an equal opinion in determining whether or not a pregnancy is aborted.  The baby shares an equal component of both parents’ DNA … it is their baby, not just her baby.  The laws of anatomy dictate that the female is the one to carry the baby for nine months.  The male should not be punished simply because he does not have a uterus.  The woman made the choice to have sex with the person whose sperm has now combined with her egg to form a life.  I firmly believe that you should not have sex with a person unless you are prepared for the possibility that you may be responsible for raising a child together (condoms break and a couple of my friends are “pill babies”).

In situations where the woman did not have a choice in sexual activity (such as rape and incest), then the criminal who forced sex certainly should have absolutely no voice in what womb-related actions occur.  Instead, he should be castrated and locked away for the rest of his life.

I cannot imagine making such a life-changing (in many ways!) decision such as having an abortion without the support of the other person who is also responsible for that growing life.  That is why I fail to understand the concept of “casual” sex.  When a man and woman come together and have sex, both need to have a mutual understanding of the consequences.  The question needs to be asked before the clothes come off … if a pregnancy results in this act, what do you think should happen?  If the answers aren’t the same, keep it zipped.

If you think the United States is too restrictive and just awful in its puritanical politics, there’s a new place you can go exercise your right to choose, where the abortion trend is just now emerging in your favor

Colombia

Yes, but – abortion is still not allowed on-demand, so birth control is still going to be a hassle. Colombian women will still be oppressed. Perhaps a NOW / NARAL expeditionary task force ought to get on top of that ASAP.

SJR 127 easily passed in the State Senate today, which speaks well of the morality of those elected to public office in Tennessee. The usual suspects were not nearly as pleased

The wingnuts droned on forever with their favorite nutty theory about fetuses being the equivalent of 19th century slaves. I say it’s past time for some technology that will free the ‘fetus slaves’ by putting them into the bodies of rabid old white rightwing men. What a damper that would put on their drinking and womanizing days.

So, yes, here in Tennessee we are one step closer to enshrining a woman’s second-class citizenship in our constitution. Only nine senators voted against the amendment.

The pro-abortion forces seem to have the maturity of a slightly-advanced adolescent. Too bad, I guess. Name someone you know who was never a fetus, and I’ll agree that fetuses aren’t really people. As to other accounts of the pro-abortion forces

The press conference was a little like a good Irish wake. Folks were crying and hugging, but also catching up with each other and there was some laughter and some smiles. Still, everyone in the room knew that the amendment was going to pass; I think for most of them, it was just seeing it happen, and hearing the vitriol during the debate that made it hard.

As for me, I have deeply mixed feelings. I already thought there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that they wouldn’t pass the amendment, and so to hear these folks get up in front of the microphones, some of them still sobbing, talking about how this will be the first time the state’s constitution is amended to deny rights to a group of people, was really sad. One woman asked how she was supposed to tell rape victims that they can’t have abortions and then she started to cry. I did too.

Well, the statement of fact is incorrect, but the conclusion is overwrought as well. This was all about rape victims like the World Series is about football. What irritates me is that those protesting on the Hill today weren’t there for rape victims in the least. They were there for a most ignoble and morally bankrupt cause. To paint it any other way is misleading. It simultaneoulsy amuses and saddens me that the liberated and enlightened women of our time do all they can to de-feminate themselves. The standard of equality they hold is male centered, demanding that they become less and less like women at every step. Women are biologically different – scrap it. Women are mentally different – scrap it. At every step, the modern liberal woman is self-loathing. Why one as woman fights for a “right” to nullify the primary differentiation between male and female boggles my mind. Demand it if you want, but you’re sacrificing your role as the backbone of the family and Western civilization for some perverse brand of “equality”. It’s the ultimate squandering of one’s inheritance.

UPDATE I see the pot has been stirred. Good. It just goes to show that the anti-life argument is one of emotion instead of logic.

I am now going to go mingle with a bunch of Republican pro-life women.

I love militant feminists. They make me laugh (which is why I link to them so much, in case you’re wondering). Here’s a protest with some teeth – wear a Red Burka Shirt if you live in a Red State, and then go to the General Assembly to let all know that you’re a serious person

Get your Red Burka T-Shirt here, and tell the world what you think about the relentless, never-ending, Republican-led and State-financed War on Women.

I plan to wear a Red Burka Shirt when I go downtown to watch my elected representatives vote on whether or not women should be returned to the 19th century when the male-dominated state had the unmitigated audacity to rob women of their personhood.

I don’t know…that Red Burka Shirt looks a tad revealing. Maybe we should take it to the land of the burkas for a test-run. I will gladly start a fund drive for the first militant feminist willing to argue that Sharia law is as imposing on women as is the United States (or the Tennessee Code Annotated, for that matter). The prize will be a one-way ticket to BurkaLand, where one can demonstrate to her heart’s content. The only obligation is that the winner is to write a report from her jail cell as to the true differences between America and countries where burkas are required to be worn by law.

The comments are a hoot as well – “The Taliban have come to America.” Really?

Well, in all fairness, it is possible. President Bush did make sure they weren’t ruling Afghanistan anymore.

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Some are up in arms about the constitutional appropriateness of the “Choose Life” license plate in Tennessee.

But see, that’s the beauty of choice. You can choose not to put one on your car. Plus, bumper stickers, even when applying 20 or 30 at a time, are still likely cheaper and still get your point across as well as a license plate.

And yes, the state is sanctioning a particular policy position, as it should. Abortion ought to be a state issue. You can still have abortions in Tennessee because the federal government says you can. However, you’re now going to have to see a license plate every now and again that says it’s a bad thing. This is what happens when the democratic process works. The elected represenatives in Tennessee have voted and spoken. The anti-life side loses, and they can’t stand it.

Besides, aren’t we hearing all the time that those who are pro-choice are for a choice, and are not pro-abortion? And that even many on the Left who believe in a woman’s right to choose want to see as few abortions as possible?

If that’s truly the case, one should be agnostic at worst on the Choose Life license plate.

Mark Rose has a rather powerful post regarding the moral lowground occupied by those fighting against the democratically selected “Choose Life” license plates in Tennessee.

Then again, abortion hasn’t been a democratic issue in over three decades.

I think this new blog ought to rename itself “The Kleinheider Factcheck Blog”.

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Six Democrats for Misogny….so says this blog entry.

Misleading, really. I have a sneaking suspicion that the female unborn are considered no more than the March road kill I saw on I-40 coming back from Memphis today.

Possums, raccoons, and fetuses – whatever.

UPDATE Michael Silence captions two more opposing arguments, brought on by the vote in the Tennessee Senate this past week. There is an attempt to declare pro life individuals hypocrits, citing something about we as a society abandoning children after they are born. I’m sure what proof there is for that contention, or that it’s exclusively the pro-lifer’s fault if there is any. How one gets from there to preemptive extermination as a solution is perplexing.

I think this is all I’m going to write on abortion for the time being. There are certainly other topics worth addressing – I’m done banging my head into a very hard wall (for now).

From TGW, we hear the clarion call to femi-fascist arms

I’m old enough to have gone through this fight before, under much less daunting circumstances than we now face. It’s IMPERATIVE that, if you are outraged by this current, way-odious steamrolling of women’s concerns, you make yourself heard. NOW. If not now, when? If not you, who?

Go ahead and believe that the right to abortion will never affect you, or your children, or their children. That it’s really not such a big deal. Because it IS a big deal. You never know. These people want to shut off all options for women, and children, who may find themselves pregnant, at some point, under ANY circumstance. Think about that. Look at your loved ones. Think of those who have no one to think of them. Then, for the sake of anything you find sacred, DO SOMETHING. This just cannot stand.

One would think you would be old enough to know better, too. As adoring as this little rant is, and whether the anti-life forces feel it or not, we on the pro-life side are constantly thinking about other people. That’s the entire point.

When we see a pregnant teenager, we think of helping ready the child for the world. We also think of adoption, which provides many more people with a fuller life. Save the usual exceptions, women wanting abortions had to do something to put themselves in the situation. Claiming victimhood over a consensual act is terribly unconvincing.

I had written a post criticizing Betty Friedan’s legacy of abortion rights, but it wasn’t fair to put the legal termination of 47 million unborn lives on her alone. I now spread the net wider, to include all the 1960s feminist pioneers (Abzug, Steinem, Martin, etc.) who gave the two-fold cover of privacy and progress to Justice Harry Blackmun and his weak-kneed jurisprudence in Roe v. Wade.

Tennessee Gorilla Women note that South Dakota only has one abortion clinic

Today’s Washington Post has a story about the difficulty of obtaining an abortion in South Dakota’s one abortion clinic. Yeah, South Dakota looks a lot like Mississippi. Moral of the story? Women should leave the friggin’ state.

Oh, and the heart-wrenching tale picked out by the Post to make the point?

Another patient, a 29-year-old teacher who became pregnant while using birth control with her boyfriend of a few months, who is also a teacher, said she was not ready for a child and neither was he.

“I’m pro-choice all the way,” said the woman, who is from a town about 90 miles from Sioux Falls. She found out she was pregnant at seven weeks and had to wait two weeks for the abortion because the clinic’s schedule conflicted with her work schedule.

You don’t like the dog. I don’t like the dog. Let’s take it out back and shoot it. Is there any difference between that mindset and the one above? What’s worse, I have an eerie suspicion that many pro-choice women would actually come to the dog’s defense.

Mark Rose has a good post on the similarities between abortion and slavery. I did a post on the parallels between Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade a while back, which is why it caught my interest. He puts together a well thought-out and poignant seven-point list. The last one is the best

7. Like slavery, abortion won’t be legal forever. It cannot possibly last. And, like slavery, future Americans will look back to the Roe v. Wade era and ask “How could we have allowed that to go on in this country for so long?”

Absolutely correct. Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war. Such extremes won’t be necessary nowadays. We only need one more supreme court justice who refuses to put concocted privacy rights over life.

UPDATE Harry Monroe adds some more analysis.

Right Minded had this post from Harry Monroe

Harry Monroe asks “What happens if Roe is overturned?”

Here’s my answer: The power to make laws restricting or enforcing abortion rights would return to individual states. Some would outlaw abortion, some would allow it with some restrictions, some would enable it with few, if any, restrictions.

But I do share Harry’s vision that “eventually abortion will be restricted to cases involving threats to the mother’s life, and perhaps rape or incest.” Indeed, one day we will look back on abortion the same way we today look back on slavery and the Holocaust and ask “How could we have ever allowed such a thing to happen?”

Absolutely. And akin to a post I wrote early last month, which I reprint here.

(more…)

Bob Krumm has an excellent post centering around abortion. It’s one of the few things I read everyday that I wish I had written myself.

I find it a sad statement that one cannot be pro-life and feminist. Of course, feminism does mean different things to different people, very few variations of which are logically coherent on a good day, whether or not unimpeded by 1960s era drugs.

This is one is somewhere between shooting fish in a barrel and taking candy from a baby.

Feminists for Life (FFL) is an organization that believes feminism does not require an advocacy of abortion. In short – women are strong and equal, but there are some biological differences we just can’t get around.

Take this rather disturbing analysis of FFL ripped from The Nation (whose nation is not exactly clear)

For FFL there’s only one right decision: Have that baby. And since women’s moral judgment cannot be trusted, abortion must be outlawed, whatever the consequences for women’s lives and health–for rape victims and 12-year-olds and 50-year-olds, women carrying Tay-Sachs fetuses and women at risk of heart attack or stroke, women who have all the children they can handle and women who don’t want children at all.

That’s because they aren’t really feminists–a feminist could not force another woman to bear a child, any more than she could turn a pregnant teenager out into a snowstorm. They are fetalists.

First, I find it laughable that any pro-choice advocate would attempt to advance her position by taking the moral high ground. Defending one’s position by planting the stake of morality afar left as can be, demanding that morality only exists when one enjoys the alternative to terminate life, is macabre.

Second – “fetalist”? Are we serious? Is that a bad thing? TGW thinks it’s nice

Katha Pollitt terms genuinely anti-choice women, such as Feminists for Life, as merely “pro fetal life.” There are worse things they could be called.

Really? Worse? Like what, exactly?

Third. Let’s all get this part straight. On average, half the “fetuses” born are female. The only difference in the minds of adult females who write for The Nation and newer females appears to logically be that one has the ability to reproduce (the adult at The Nation) and the other (the little girl) does not. The king right (er, queen right) that feminists enjoy is the unbridled right to terminate one’s pregnancy, and at times seemingly to advocate the termination of as many other pregnancies as possible. Before a girl can become pregnant, I presume she’s no more than an inconvenience to the movement, or a potential long term recruit. If women in the feminist movement exist solely to preserve the right to terminate pregnancy, which is where they, sua sponte, have pigeon-holed themselves, then until that right ripens and becomes real, the inconvenience of the girl to the “mother” outweighs the rights that little girl may enjoy later as a reproductive member of society.

If it’s truly just inconvenience and life change that is feared (control over one’s own body – right, whatever), then that doesn’t change once birth takes place. Your body is still terribly affected. Termination by revolutionary feminist rationale should still, therefore, be legal.

The ardent feminist tact is logically no different than libertarians forgetting that other things matter beyond the cloud of marijuana legalization. Feminists as defined in this The Nation article are one-trick ponies. I have no trouble, at all, believing that women are on equal legal and practical footing with men. I don’t think that people like Katha Pollitt can see the forest for the tree(s). And I do think it’s one tree.

At least the libertarian position doesn’t affect anyone else. The feminist position as articulated here demands a right to unapologetically destroy at will.

Since I’m partial to live blogging (at least in the last 24 hours), Charmaine took it upon herself to live blog the happenings outside the Supreme Court today after oral arguments in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood concluded (the minor abortion parental notification case). Some NOW gals didn’t take too kindly to some of the, well, attention.

As has always been said, a picture is a worth a thousand words. Just keep scrolling down.

In today’s Washington Post (among other sources)

As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion,” declared his firm opposition to certain affirmative action programs, and strongly endorsed a government role in “protecting traditional values.”

Certainly this should not surprise anyone. A careful combing of the Constitution shows no broad-based right to privacy or provides for a right to an abortion. This kind of statement by Elito will likely irritate many on the Left, but I cannot imagine why that would be the case. The whole idea of a federal privacy right outside the Third and Fourth Amendment is a judicial creation, extra-constitutional in nature, and quite frankly, poorly created law. This past statement by Samuel Elito bodes well for his other interpretative tendencies, hopefully reigning in the commerce clause and other travesties of constitutional interpretation that have left the Founders spinning where they currently rest.