Regular readers of the Wall Street Journal’s online opinion site, OpinionJournal will be familiar with their weekdaily feature, Best of the Web, heretofore referred to as “BotW”. Those familiar with BotW will likely be familiar with BotW’s theory that an increasingly conservative shift in young people’s outlook on life may well be due to the legalization of abortion in 1973, which James Taranto (editor of BotW) refers to as “the Roe Effect“. In essence, by supporting the institution of abortion, liberals are effectively pricing themselves out of that intellectual/political market by killing those future adults most likely to be raised in an environment neutral to, if not overtly friendly towards abortion. It’s hard to garner support from people when you’ve killed most of your potential supporters.
I see a related situation arising in regards to the impending fight surrounding reforming Social Security. Not only have liberals killed off those most likely to support the continuation of the remaining New Deal programs, but they have reduced the potential pool to draw Social Security funds from by nearly 43 million human beings over the last thirty years, thus bringing us to the current situation.
I know I’m being cynical about this, but consider how different the situation would be if those lives had been spared. Not only would there be 43 million more souls to ante up to cover for grandmothers and grandfathers, but odds are that more than a few of those would have had children of their own. The oldest of the aborted children would be just a bit older than me and more than likely settling down to have children, if they hadn’t done so already. Those children would be 35 by the time the President’s 2040’s rolled around, paying into the system and having children of their own. There’s a very good chance that this coming crisis might not even be on the horizon had Boomers and Gen X-ers not so enthusiastically pursued the destruction of their own children.
I sincerely believe that the American Left’s continued support of the murder of millions of children per year has and will continue to hurt this country. The cruel irony of it all may be that it ends up hurting its supporters in a political, in addition to a demographic, moral, emotional and spiritual fashion far more than they could ever have conceived.
UPDATE:
Looks like Rob over at Say Anything posted a similar train of thought last month. Go ye and read.
Social Security And The “Roe Effect”
Here’s an interesting post about abortion and its effects on the current debate of social security reform. Since the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade it has been estimated that women have had approximately 43 million abortions. There is no doubt
The legalization of abortion was somewhat akin to the repeal of prohibition. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Unfortunately I lost the text that I want to reference. If I recall correctly, however, the estimated number of illegal abortions in America was 600-700 thousand per year. The number of legal abortions performed in the first year was reported at 1 million to 1.2 million. While the increase is dramatic, so to is the number of illegal operations performed.
Even given your figures, that’s still ~20 million less Americans over a 30 year period. I’d say that that constitutes a considerable population that never got the chance to live, breathe, vote and pay taxes.
[…] Here’s an interesting post about abortion and its effects on the current debate of social security reform. Since the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade it has been estimated that women have had approximately 43 million abortions. There is no doubt that had those unborn children been allowed to grow into adulthood their impact on our current society would be considerable. […]
[…] Well, Howard Dean came up to Ithaca today to talk about his agenda as newly-elected DNC chair. This is the second occasion on which I’ve heard him speak, and both times I’ve been struck by how much more comfortable he seems when fielding questions from (and more often than not actively arguing with) an audience member, than when he’s delivering some variant on a stump speech.On more substantive matters, I think Dean and the DNC are deceiving themselves if they think “Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of an open dialogue with evangelical Christians” (thats a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to what he said at one point). Dean believes Democrats have a good shot at winning evangelical (and Catholic) votes based on the fact that the Democratic party more closely adheres to Christian nonviolence and charity on a wide range of foreign and domestic issues (readiness to go to war, capital punishment, social spending) than do the Republicans. I’ll paraphrase again: “if we were to make a scorecard of all the issues the Bible tells Christians to care about, Republicans would win on gays and abortions, and we’d win on the other 25.” According to this line of reasoning, religious voters’ predilection for going Republican is largely based on a failure to weigh their religious obligations properly, placing too much emphasis on gays and gynecologists in the process.I’m not sure this argument is quite apt. If I were a devout Christian (full disclosure: I’m not), I might well be rationally justified in putting the issue of abortion ahead of that laundry list of issues Dean puts in the Democrats’ column. After all, for most evangelical Christians abortion isn’t just an activity that leads to the death of innocents – abortion by its very nature kills those who epitomize innocence, at least in the Christian sense of absence of sin. In comparison, something like charitable obligations looks positively trivial, and even capital punishment pales in comparison (as death row inmates are generally there for pretty heinous crimes). The number of babies aborted in the United States since Roe v. Wade is a pretty astonishing 43 million – I’d be surprised if the number of criminals executed in that time span surpassed 4,000. Christian morality doesn’t have too much to do with utilitarianism, but common sense tells people that 43 million deaths are a lot more serious than 4,000. This number is big enough to trivialize even the number of civilian deaths in America’s post-Vietnam wars. If you do the math, I’m not at all convinced there’s a rational reason for devout Christian voters to go Democratic over Republican. […]