Interesting article, Steve. I'll post it here for easier reading.
Study: U.S. abortion policies are destroying Democrats -- literally
Jun 30, 2004
By Michael Foust
Baptist Press
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Is it possible that Al Gore lost the 2000 election because the very people who would have voted for him have long been dead -– killed by abortions years ago?
That's the theory behind an article by writer Larry L. Eastland in the June edition of The American Spectator. The article was reprinted by The Wall Street Journal June 28.
Eastland's theory is simple: Democrats are more likely to favor abortion, and their children -– like all children –- are likely to take on the voting habits of their parents. Because Democrats are more likely to abort their children, he posits, they literally are aborting future Democratic voters.
If the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had never taken place, he asserts, there would have been thousands of additional Democratic voters in Florida to put Gore over the top in that state.
"Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters -- due to the abortion policies they advocate -- gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?" he asks.
Pro-life advocates have long used reasoning similar to Eastland's -– arguing, for instance, that the person who would have found the cure for cancer may have been aborted in the past three decades. But Eastland takes that argument a different route, arguing that pro-choicers have hurt their own cause by aborting the very voters they crave.
Eastland says that there were 12,274,368 people of voting age population missing from the 2000 election because of abortions performed between 1973-82. If they had followed voting habits of 2000, then 51.2 percent of them -– or 6,033,097 -- would have voted.
A Wirthlin Worldwide survey, he says, shows that Democrats have 30 percent more abortions than do Republicans. Combining all the data, Eastland asserts that, nationwide, there were 2,978,605 missing Democratic voters in 2000 compared to 2,096,406 missing Republican voters -– a difference of some 882,000 voters.
How would that have impacted Florida? Eastland says that Gore would have received 153,163 additional votes, President Bush 107,799 additional votes. That Democratic advantage would have translated into a 45,366-vote victory for Gore -– a complete reversal from the 537-vote margin Bush enjoyed. Such a win would have put Gore over the top in the Electoral College.
"Missing Voters -- through decisions made in the 1970s and early 1980s, encouraged and emboldened by the feminist movement at the height of its power -- altered the outcome of the U.S. presidency a generation later, in a way proponents of legal abortion could not have imagined," Eastland asserts.
Of all the differences between the two parties, abortion is one of the largest ones. Since 1980 every Republican presidential nominee has been pro-life, every Democratic nominee pro-choice. Both parties have opposing positions on abortion in their platforms.
The post-Roe Republican advantage, Eastland says, began in the 1992 election –- the first one in which babies aborted in 1973 would have been of voting age -– and it continues to grow. This year, he says, there are 18,336,576 missing voters. In 2008, that number will be 24,408,960, he asserts.
"Examining these results through a partisan political lens, the Democrats have given the Republicans a decided advantage in electoral politics, one that grows with each election," Eastland argues. "Moreover, it is an advantage that they can never regain. Even if abortion were declared illegal today, and every single person complied with the decision, the advantage would continue to grow until the 2020 election, and would stay at that level throughout the voting lifetime of most Americans living today."
One irony in Eastland's theory is that most missing voters –- if alive –- would be advocating the very policy that led to their abortion in the first place.
The absence of missing voters this year, Eastland says, may again tip the election to Bush.
"Like an avalanche that picks up speed, mass, and power as it thunders down a mountain, the number of Missing Voters from abortion changes the landscape of politics," Eastland says. "The absence of the missing voters may not be noticed, but that doesn't mean its political impact disappears. As seen during a famine, what no longer exists becomes as relevant as what does."
