Most of us around here know that the Wall Street Journal editorial page isn't exactly a force for progressive politics. First they gave props to some racist remarks on the inflammatory and juvenile website
Little Green Footballs. Then there was the time that they ran an Op-Ed by Rush Limbaugh
denouncing Woodward's
Plan of Attack.
But now they have far, far outdone themselves. A piece entitled The Empty Cradle Will Rock argues that if the fetuses aborted 18 years or more prior to 2000 had not been aborted, they would have become voters which would have tipped the electoral balance in Al Gore's favor. No joke.
This bit of social science gone amuck brings to mind another piece (not published in the WSJ) which argued that a decrease in crime roughly 18 years after Roe v. Wade was because the fetuses of poor people had been aborted, instead of raised in poverty (you can choose which thesis is more repugnant).
Anyway, here's what the article has to say (I've cut to summarize, but this gives you the basic idea):
More than 40 million legal abortions have been performed and documented in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion legal. The debate remains focused on the legality and morality of abortion. What's largely ignored is a factual analysis of the political consequences of 40 million abortions...
The question arises: Who would these Missing Voters have been if they had reached voting age? What would their values have been? How would they have voted? What impact would they have had on the great debates in America, including the abortion debate?...
- Republicans have fewer abortions than their proportion of the population, Democrats have more than their proportion of the population. Democrats account for 30% more abortions than Republicans (49% vs. 35%).
- There are 19,748,000 Democrats who are not with us today. (49.37 percent of 40 million).
- There are 13,900,000 Republican who are not with us today. (34.75 percent of 40 million).
- By comparison, then, the Democrats have lost 5,848,000 more voters than the Republicans have...
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. 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.
Ummm...yeah.
I don't know what this is supposed to prove. Maybe this is some awkward attempt to persuade liberals (along pragmatic, self-interest lines) that abortion really should be illegal. Maybe this guy thinks that you really can predict what close to 20 million aborted fetuses's political preferences would be just by looking at who their parents might have been. Maybe he's just some nut with too much time on his hands.
I don't really know where this analysis came from, but I do know that social science can do much better than this. I know that social science will never have the legitimacy of physics or chemistry, but it can be a useful tool and help us formulate good policy. Well, except for when it looks like this.