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06/30/2004: "Roe Effect: Fact or Fiction"

I first heard about the Roe Effect from James Taranto over at the Opinion Journal. On March 5 (first item), he said:

Regular readers of this column know that for some time we have been pushing a pet theory about the political effect of abortion. We refer not to the issue of abortion but to the practice, and our theory is that abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be.

We base this on two assumptions. First, that liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions. Second, that 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. We call this the Roe effect, after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

Well, it seems the battle has been joined. Dr. Alex Tabarrok claims to disagree, saying that "The reduction in population from abortion is far smaller than the number of abortions." and "Putting things the other way, compensating behavior means that abortion liberalization will reduce the number of births by less than the number of abortions."

Then again, Dr. Tabarrok doesn't really disagree; his final substantive paragraph:

The reduction in births, even though considerably smaller than than the number of abortions, is not distributed randomly across the population so abortion policy can have an impact on things like crime and teenage pregnancy but the number of Democrats and Republicans has got to be one of the least interesting consequences.

That is, Dr. Tabarrok cares that the Roe decision's effect on crime and teen pregnancy; he does not care about the Roe decision's effect on election outcomes.

In all fairness, Dr. Tabarrok did not disagree with Mr. Taranto; he disagreed with a Larry L. Eastland piece. But Dr. Tabarrok also used terms like "embarrassing low", "sad", "degrades", and "pathetic" in addition to "wrong". I harbor no illusions, when it comes to in economics and blogging, Dr. Tabarrok can whoop my bootie. That said, it seems to me that Mr. Eastland is rubber and Dr. Tabarrok is glue.