Why the Left is Dying
Hans Zeiger
December 11, 2004

The National Abortion Rights Action League's youth coalition, Generation Pro-Choice, dispatched an email this week with the headline "Rumors of Gen Pro-Choicers demise are greatly exaggerated." Interestingly, it didn't say that the "rumors" were false, only that they were exaggerated. It is increasingly clear to NARAL, though subtly expressed, that the demise of the Left is imminent.

And it seems that the Left is its own worst enemy. NARAL's "Generation
Pro-Choice" is dying because liberals are birthing fewer children.

James Pinkerton recently contended in Newsday that "the left has
birth-controlled, aborted and maybe also gay-libbed itself into a smaller
role in American society." Overall, the fertility rate in Kerry states is
around 12 percent lower than in Bush states. The Economist reports that in
the ultra-liberal state of Vermont, the annual fertility rate is 49 children
for every 1,000 women of childbearing age. But in the heavily pro-Bush state
of Utah, nearly twice as many children per 1,000 child-bearing-aged women
are being born. Of every 1,000 Utah women, 91 children are born.

Among liberal constituencies, homosexual couples are certainly not having
children. Despite the rapidity and effectiveness with which the homosexual
movement advances in politics and culture, homosexuals simply don't
reproduce.

Abortion has much more to do with the fertility rates amongst liberals. Of
the twenty states with the lowest abortion rates according to the Centers
for Disease Control, only Maryland, Maine, and Wisconsin voted for Kerry. Of
the ten states with the highest abortion rates, only Florida, Kansas, and
Virginia voted for Bush.

States that voted most overwhelmingly for Kerry tend to be ranked among the
highest abortion rates. Kerry's most impressive lead over Bush was in the
District of Columbia where he scored 90 percent. The District also has the
nation's highest annual abortion rate at 46 abortions per 1,000 women of
childbearing age. Of the nine states with the lowest abortion rates - Idaho,
Colorado, Kentucky, South Dakota, Mississippi, West Virginia, Utah,
Missouri, and South Carolina - the average winning percentage for Bush was
nearly 60 percent. Similar trends were projected by Planned Parenthood's
think tank, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, after the 2000 election.

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.

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Hans Zeiger is a columnist, political activist, and student leader from Puyallup, Washington. At age 18, Hans is an Eagle Scout and president of the Scout Honor Coalition. He is the past chairman of Washington Young Americans for Freedom and a former research analyst at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. He is a freshman at Hillsdale College in Michigan.