Res Publica 2005

The other day, on the Forest Nymph blog , run by a woman who is very pro-life, I ran across one of the saddest things: a woman who was ranting in post abortion depression, discussing her abortion. It was so sad because the woman was so angry, had been so twisted by her life decisions, and I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but in her anger and readiness to reach out and blame and resent, I didn't know where to begin. She is a great example of being in "slow suicide mode," where she is letting the darkness she feels eat at her heart with a rage which is consuming her, instead of letting go of the bitterness and working for healing. I hope she finds it before it destroys her.

Ran across this piece about the liberal abortion rights policy, which sort of ties in to this at a larger, macro level:

By Hans Zeigler

According to the Census Bureau, the 2004 Voting Age Population was 217.8 million. Since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, over 40 million documented abortions have occurred. And of those aborted Americans, 18,336,576 would have been at least 18-years old on November 2. John Kerry lost the popular vote by only 3,461,992 ballots. Kerry could have used another 18 million votes - five times his margin of defeat. That isn't to say that all 18 million citizens would have voted for Kerry, or voted at all, but given the power of parental influence the chances are likely that these aborted Americans would have been a major Democrat constituency.

What's more troubling for Democrats is that by 2008, the deficit in their Voting Age Population will have risen to 24,408,960 - those who were aborted between 1973 and 1990. "Liberals have been remarkably blind to the fact that every day the abortions they advocate dramatically decrease their power to do so," writes Larry Eastland in the American Spectator.

Wirthlin polling conducted a recent study of 2,000 Americans to determine political connections to abortion. Democrats reported having a close relationship with someone who had an abortion at 49.37 percent, while only 35 percent of Republicans said that they were close to someone who had an abortion. Projecting these percentages onto the total numbers of abortion since 1973, Eastland found that there are 19.7 million missing Democrats and 13.9 million missing Republicans. Democrats are at a disadvantage by 5.84 million missing voters.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has referred to these trends as the Roe Effect.

"Abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be," writes Taranto. First, "liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions." Second, "children's political views tend to reflect those of their parents - not exactly, of course, and not in every case, but on average. Thus abortion depletes the next generation of liberals and eventually makes the population more conservative."

Liberal author Philip Longman concludes in a recent Washington Post article that the "empty cradle" is a result of evolutionary natural selection. "When secular-minded Americans decide to have few, if any, children, they unwittingly give a strong evolutionary advantage to the other side of the culture divide."

To suggest that abortion has a very real impact on cultural trends is neither evolutionary nor, from a conservative point of view, worthy of celebration. The murder of a human being is equally wrong whether he or she is born to a liberal or to a conservative, to an anarchist or to a communist. And the survival of certain individuals over others says nothing about the comparative worth of one person over another. The abortion of one child does not indicate that his genes were less favorable than his peer's. America is built on the principle of equality: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That principle is not predicated on the biological evolution of the human species. Quite to the contrary, it is founded on the belief that God has made every soul in His image.

The rejection of that most fundamental truth, the founding principle of America, is the death wish of the American Left. Liberals have not only failed to reproduce, they are quite literally killing themselves.

Sad. Slow cultural suicide. Watching a person anger or grieve themselves to death is always a sad thing. Watching a cultural movement prove to be a dead end, when much of it is good and worth learning about is also sad. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may look back and say to their professors, but why did they do that? And their professors may say, "Why indeed?"

(A slightly different version of this essay posted at Knitting a Conundrum)