More Demographics

Best of the Web has an interesting spin on the political/cultural demographics resulting from abortion. The observation is embedded in a critique of an argument predicting eventual Democrat political dominance resulting from the liberalizing attitude of Americans toward sex. The idea is that Republicans will lose support because of their traditional positions on moral issues. BOTW writes:

The second problem is Edsall's failure to acknowledge that changes in attitudes and laws concerning sex have a long-term effect on the electorate. If a pregnant woman chooses tomorrow to have an abortion, the result in 2021 will be one fewer eligible voter--and that's a statement of fact, not a moral judgment. If tens of millions of women have abortions over decades, as they have, it will eventually have a significant effect on the voting-age population.

Not all women, after all, are equally likely to have abortions. It's almost a truism that women who have abortions are more pro-choice than those who carry their pregnancies to term, and it stands to reason that they generally have more-liberal attitudes about sex and religion. It also seems reasonable to assume that parents have some influence on their children, so that if liberal women are having abortions, the next generation will be more conservative than it otherwise would be.

Now, I am generally skeptical of this argument, and I sure wouldn't hold my breath as a Republican for this demographic phenomena to play itself out. There are a lot of social influences that determine a lot of social attitudes. Media depictions of sexual attitudes, for example, would seem to be controlling in both the short and the long run.

But still, social attitudes are passed along in the family. For example, whether you are a Republican or Democrat has more to do with what your parents were than anything else. Likewise, the student radical leaders of the 60's were more often than not the red-diaper babies of the Communists of the 30's. One would suspect that attitudes toward abortion and sexuality would be communicated throught that mysterious process by which attitudes are formed within the family.

Likewise, part of Stark's argument [see below] for the sociological success of Christianity was simply that Christians outbred the competition. Christians didn't expose or abort their children like the Pagans did. Likewise, Christian morality tended to keep Christians alive longer and able to reproduce more children than the Pagans. These kinds of trends, as small as they are at any given time, can make huge differences over a long enough time.