Both of these columns are posted in full on page 2, in case you cannot access them.
New York Times op ed, “Why pro-choice Is a bad choice for Democrats,” June 22
Wall Street Journal op ed, “Unintended consequences: It’s not enough to be ‘wanted’,” June 19
Also, some readers of this blog may know Dan McConchie of Americans United for Life. He was involved in a serious motorcycle accident Friday that resulted in a lower spinal cord injury. No further details known yet. Please pray for Dan.
[Hat tips: NYT piece, reader Jeff; WSJ piece, Dr. Frank]


New York Times
Why pro-choice Is a bad choice for Democrats
By Melinda Henneberger
June 22, 2007
I KEEP reading about a universe in which social conservatives are warming to Rudy Giuliani. But this would have to be a place where his estranged children and three wives and multiple appearances in fishnets were irrelevant to the Republican base. Where the nice gay couple he moved in with between marriages would be asked to appear in the film montage at the nominating convention in St. Paul.
Even in the real world, a pro-choice Republican nominee would be a gift to the Democrats, because the Republican Party wins over so many swing voters on abortion alone. Which is why Fred Thompson, who is against abortion rights, is getting so much grateful attention from his party now. And why, despite wide opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats must still win back such voters to take the White House next year.
Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.
Why would that be, given that Roe v. Wade was decided almost 35 years ago? Opponents of abortion rights saw 2004 as the chance of a lifetime to overturn Roe, with a movement favorite already in the Oval Office and several spots on the Supreme Court likely to open up. A handful of Catholic bishops spoke out more plainly than in any previous election season and moved the Catholic swing vote that Al Gore had won in 2000 to Mr. Bush.
The standard response from Democratic leaders has been that anyone lost to them over this issue is not coming back – and that regrettable as that might be, there is nothing to be done. But that is not what I heard from these voters.
Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.” Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.
What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters – and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and – though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this – a human rights issue comparable to slavery.
Again and again, these voters said Democrats are too unwilling to tolerate dissent on abortion. It is a point of orthodoxy no more open to debate within the party than the ordination of women is in Rome.
Democratic Party leaders should also stop pushing the perception that Republicans are natural defenders of the faithful. For years, they have done just that by tirelessly portraying our current president as this committed – indeed, obsessed – pro-lifer who would stop at nothing to see Roe overturned. Karl Rove couldn’t have said it better himself; this was better advertising than hard money could buy.
Today, in a similarly oblivious way, the leading Democratic presidential contenders are condemning the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold a ban on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. An overwhelming majority of Americans, polls show, support a ban. Legal scholars have underscored the narrowness of the ruling in the partial-birth case, Gonzales v. Carhart, which does not even outlaw all late-term abortions. Yet the leading Democratic candidates, all of whom are lawyers, choose to overstate its impact.
Hillary Clinton called the decision “a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that … recognized the importance of women’s health.” Barack Obama echoed that it “dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.” Though John Edwards was one of only two United States senators who did not cast a vote on the bill in 2003, he, too, found the decision to uphold that law “ill-considered and sweeping,” and “a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election.”
Actually, it is a stark reminder of how fully capable they all are of losing it. A Democratic senator I spoke with recently did not see the disconnect between public opinion and the party’s position on Carhart as any reason to worry: “Make no mistake; this is a pro-choice country, period.”
But in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 41 percent of respondents favored stricter limits on abortion, with an additional 23 percent saying it should not be permitted at all.
What are we to make of all this? Surely at a minimum that our enduring reluctance to acknowledge the complexity of the abortion issue has only prolonged and hardened the debate. Most Americans fall somewhere between the extremes of “never” and “no problem” when it comes to abortion.
What polling can’t capture and politicians won’t hear is the voice of the nun I interviewed who considers herself pro-choice – and has been disciplined by her diocese as a result – because she does not think abortion is wrong for rape victims. Or the voices of the many women I spoke to who hold far more expansive views yet call themselves pro-life. Most people differentiate between a fetus in the early weeks of development and at nearly full term, and draw the line at a procedure that Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan regarded as infanticide.
Would Democrats who hate Carhart really switch parties or stay home on Election Day if their leaders began to acknowledge such distinctions? After the last seven years, I don’t think so. Yes, the abortion-rights lobby has raised a lot of money since the ban, but the statements of the Democratic candidates will cost them, too. This issue has been very, very good to the Republican Party – and there is plenty more where that came from.
Melinda Henneberger is the author of “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Wall Street Journal
Unintended consequences: It’s not enough to be ‘wanted’
Illegitimacy has risen despite – indeed, because of – legal abortion.
By John R. Lott Jr.
June 19, 2007
The abortion debate usually centers on the morality of the act itself. But liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast social changes in America. With the perennial political debate over abortion again consuming the presidential campaign and the Supreme Court, it might be time to evaluate what Roe v. Wade has meant in practical terms.
One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions just didn’t start with Roe, or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have abortions when their lives or health were endangered. Doctors in some states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health. Nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977. But many other changes occurred at the same time:

  • A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.
  • A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.
  • A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.
  • A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.
    Some of this might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and of out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?
    As to the first puzzle, part of the answer lies in attitudes to premarital sex. With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex. There were more unplanned pregnancies. But legal abortion did not mean every unplanned pregnancy led to abortion. After all, just because abortion is legal, does not mean that the decision is an easy one.
    Many academic studies have shown that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion. In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5% of all births in 1965-69 to more than 16% two decades later (1985-1989). For blacks, the numbers soared from 35% to 62%. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was nevertheless a key contributing factor.
    With legalization and women not forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, a man might well expect his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter results in an unplanned pregnancy. But what happens if the woman refuses? Maybe she is morally opposed to abortion; or perhaps she thought she could have an abortion, but upon becoming pregnant, she decides that she can’t go through with it. What happens then?
    Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, “I never wanted a baby. It’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself.” What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. The evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended “shotgun” marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the woman.
    What has happened to these babies of reluctant fathers? The mothers often end up raising the child on their own. Even as abortion has led to more out-of-wedlock births, it has also dramatically reduced adoptions of children born in America by two-parent families. Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion were also the type who wanted to keep the child.
    But all these changes–rising out-of-wedlock births, plummeting adoption rates, and the end of shotgun marriages–meant one thing: more single parent families. With work and other demands on their time, single parents, no matter how “wanted” their child may be, tend to devote less attention to their children than do married couples; after all, it’s difficult for one person to spend as much time with a child as two people can.
    From the beginning of the abortion debate, those favoring abortion have pointed to the social costs of “unwanted” children who simply won’t get the attention of “wanted” ones. But there is a trade-off that has long been neglected. Abortion may eliminate “unwanted” children, but it increases out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. Unfortunately, the social consequences of illegitimacy dominated.
    Children born after liberalized abortion rules have suffered a series of problems from problems at school to more crime. The saddest fact is that it is the most vulnerable in society, poor blacks, who have suffered the most from these changes.
    Liberalized abortion might have made life easier for many, but like sex itself sometimes, it has had many unintended consequences.
    Mr. Lott is the author of “Freedomnomics,” which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
    Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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