Larry Eastland punches some numbers of how abortions affect the electoral landscape:

• 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%).

• The more ideologically Democratic the voters are (self-identified liberals), the more abortions they have. The more ideologically Republican the voters are (self-identified conservatives), the fewer abortions they have.

This isn't particularly surprising given the core constituencies of both political parties. But translating percentages into numbers for the purpose of evaluating their impact on politics makes the importance of these numbers real. It's one thing to quote percentages and statistics, it's quite another to look at actual human beings. For example:

• 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.

What I find most interesting about this is the number of Republican abortions. It's long been my belief that the public is far more pro-life than the polls suggest (at least insofar as first-term abortions are concerned) and these kinds of numbers validate my belief. That Republican parents account for 41% of the two-party divide speaks volumes.

There are a number of pro-choice female-types that I know that have said "I wouldn't have an abortion, but I think it should be legal" that, when faced with an actual pregnancy that would greatly inconvenience them (college, for instance) probably would at least strongly consider it. My usual response to that question is to ask "So if you were pregnant today, you'd put your life on hold for nine months?" and am often responded to by a very, very thoughtful look. I think the same is true for many people that give the pro-life response to a pollster. Everything changes when the abstract becomes real. Sometimes, I can attest, it changes to the pro-life position. Given the instant-gratification nature of modern American society, though, I suspect more often than not it changes the other way. I think Republicans would be very disappointed if the right to kill the unborn were no longer protected by the atrocious Roe v Wade decision.

As for the subject of aborting votes as a whole, I'm reminded of seeing a pro-life rally on C-Span who said "They'll keep aborting theirs and we'll keep aborting ours and eventually we'll outnumber them!"

That's under the assumption, of course, that Republican's kids will remain Republican as they grow older. That's probably true more often than not, but social conservatives have been reproducing in greater numbers than social liberals anyhow and many of their children will convert at least temporarily in their college years and a decade or so beyond. Some will have children and shift to the right, some will have children and stay liberal, and others will decline to have children and will be replaced with other children of conservatives.

It reminds me of the debate between the emerging Republican majority versus the emerging Democratic one. Republicans say that since conservatives have more kids and Red States are growing in population and Red States vote Republican, Republicans will perservere. Democrats say Hispanics vote Democratic and since the Hispanic population is greatly increasing and that society is growing more urban and even in Red States cities go Democratic, Democratic dominance is inevitable*.

Soothsayers on both sides of the aisle are making assumptions that may not hold up. Republicans are assuming that kids that come from conservative households will remain conservative and ignore phenomena as in Arizona where the influx is primarily liberal and the higher populations are actually pulling the state towards the center. Democrats assume that Hispanics will always be a safe Democratic vote by 2-1 margins and that's an assumption that was once made about Irish and Italian immigrants whose grandkids are starting to veer right.

I'd be interested in knowing what the fallout rate is among liberals and conservatives when it comes to their children. Anecdotally I would say that there is probably more fall-out on the right than the left to counteract the higher reproduction rates of conservatives. Of course I say that at a time when most of my friends are childless, not wealthy, and young enough to be at the "foolish young liberal" stage of their life, so I could well be mistaken. It seems to be that people that come from liberal families (a) don't see the contradiction between liberalism and family that conservatives do and (b) those that come from single-parent or atypical households are suspicious of "family values" talk because they got by with just one parent, thankyouverymuch. There are of course Alex P. Keatons out there that rebel against their liberal parents by becoming conservative, but I'd say that those (again, looking at my sample-selection-biased 20-something peers) are outnumbered by those children of conservative parents that respond by becoming liberals, libertarians, or apathetic non-voters (and out of the Republican pool).

*- I know, horrible sentence construction. Forgive me.

Update: Michael Williams posts on the subject. His first (and right now only) commenter makes the same observation about liberals from conservative households and vice-versa, though his rationale is slightly different.