Best of the Web Today - March 5, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Quantifying the Roe Effect
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.
Some critics have objected that this is pure conjecture, but a new study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group named for a onetime Planned Parenthood head, contains data that bolster the first assumption. We briefly noted the study yesterday, and now we've taken a look at the Guttmacher data for all 50 states. They show that there is indeed a statistical correlation between how a state voted in 2000 and its teen abortion statistics for each year.
Guttmacher actually produced two sets of abortion statistics: the abortion rate, or the number of abortions among girls and women age 15-19 for each 1,000 women of that age range, and the abortion ratio, the number of abortions in that age range divided by the number of pregnancies that ended in either live birth or abortion. In brief, the rate is the likelihood that any young woman will get pregnant and have an abortion, while the ratio is the likelihood that a pregnant young woman will have an abortion rather than carry her child to term.
We've prepared a pair of tables showing the ranking of the states by abortion rate and ratio along with the candidate who carried the state in 2000 and his margin of victory. You can also find the original Guttmacher study here (link in PDF); the table from which we drew the data appears on page 8. Some interesting findings:
Of the 10 states with the highest teen abortion rates, Al Gore carried eight, and all by more than 10%. George W. Bush narrowly carried the remaining two, Nevada (by 3.5%) and Florida (by less than 0.1%).
Similarly, of the 11 states with the highest teen abortion ratios, Gore carried nine, all but one (Washington by 5.6%) by more than 10%. Bush carried two, by small margins: New Hampshire (by 1.3%) and Florida.
Of the 20 states with the lowest teen abortion rates, Gore carried only five: Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Bush carried every one of the 20 states with the lowest teen abortion ratios.
The District of Columbia, which Gore carried by 76.2%, had a higher teen abortion rate than any state, and a higher teen abortion ratio than any state except New Jersey and New York. (It is tied with Massachusetts.)
The state that gave Bush his biggest margin, Utah (40.5%), had the lowest teen abortion rate and tied with Kentucky for the lowest teen abortion ratio.
Wyoming, where Bush had his second biggest victory margin (40.1%), is something of an outlier. It ranked 14th, the third-highest among Bush states, in both teen abortion rate and ratio.
The pattern is more dramatic when we depict it visually. We punched the numbers into Microsoft Excel and created a chart mapping the teen abortion rate for all 50 states against Gore's margin of victory (Bush's margin is indicated by negative numbers):
In the chart above, the coefficient of determination (R squared) is 0.4251, which means that 42.51% of the variation in teen abortion rates among states is "explained" by the variation in the presidential victory margin. This doesn't mean that either one causes the other, of course, but it does represent a significant correlation.
Here's a similar chart showing the presidential victory margin and the teen abortion ratio:
In this case, R squared is 0.5445, an even stronger correlation. The abortion ratio may be a better proxy than the rate for a population's views on abortion, since it measures the behavior only of those women who actually face the choice of whether to abort or carry their pregnancy to term, ignoring those who avoid pregnancy in the first place.
This doesn't prove the Roe effect, which ultimately is conjectural in nature, resting as it does on a supposition about how the world would be different if the Supreme Court had not decriminalized abortion in 1973. But there now is evidence for the proposition that liberals and Democrats have more abortions.
What Liberal Media?
Here's the opening of an Associated Press dispatch by Siobahn McDonough:
How rude.
In the Senate, all the members are distinguished, if not downright honorable, and all of their states are "great." By reputation it's a place of decorum, collegiality and partisanship without poison.
But Republican big guns are bringing out GOP senators to attack their Democratic colleague running for president. John Kerry, distinguished junior senator from the great state of Massachusetts, is taking it on the chin from the frat pack.
We guess that "distinguished junior senator" bit is an attempt at humor or style, but "the frat pack"? Here McDonough clearly crosses the line into editorializing.
What's more, the "attacks" she cites are really tepid:
Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota said of Kerry, "History has shown his vision to be wrong," and, more specifically: "His vision was wrong when he voted against the first Gulf War. If we had followed his vision, Saddam would still be in Kuwait, probably with nuclear weapons capability."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia "blasted"--that's McDonough's word--Kerry's "32-year history of voting to cut defense programs."
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whom McDonough doesn't quote, "delicately raised questions about Kerry touting his Vietnam War record," again in McDonough's words. "But he quickly made nice, saying he wasn't criticizing Kerry, his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran."
This strikes us as a lot milder than, say, Sen. Ted Kennedy's deranged rants against President Bush. We guess the president isn't entitled to senatorial courtesy, since he has never had the distinct honor of serving in that august body, but if we're going to talk about the recent decline of collegiality in the Senate, wouldn't the confirmation hearings for John Tower and John Ashcroft be a better place to begin?
NoKo Honcho: I'm Loco for JoFo!
John Kerry has picked up an endorsement of sorts, from Kim Jong Il, the lunatic communist dictator of North Korea, the Financial Times reports:
In the past few weeks, speeches by the Massachusetts senator have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the official mouthpiece of Mr Kim's communist regime. . . .
Rather than dealing with President George W. Bush and hawkish officials in his administration, Pyongyang seems to hope victory for the Democratic candidate on November 2 would lead to a softening in US policy towards the country's nuclear weapons programme.
Oh well, things could be worse for Kerry. At least Al Gore hasn't endorsed him.
Wage in the Cage
"We will raise the minimum wage because no one who works 40 hours a week should have to live in poverty in America."--John Kerry, March 2
"3 American Muslims Convicted of Helping Wage Jihad"--headline, New York Times, March 5
Who's Acting Unilaterally?
A pair of articles in the New York Times illustrate the silliness of those who attack the Bush administration of "acting unilaterally" and "alienating our allies." The first, which appeared yesterday, is a fascinating tale of a multinational investigative effort that "caught dozens of suspected Qaeda members and disrupted at least three planned attacks in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia."
It all started in April 2002, when the oddly named Christian Ganczarski, "a 36-year-old Polish-born German Muslim whom the German authorities suspected was a member of Al Qaeda," rang up al Qaeda bigwig Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to tell him about a terror massacre in Tunisia:
Through electronic surveillance, the German authorities traced the call to Mr. Mohammed's Swisscom cellphone, but at first they did not know it belonged to him. Two weeks after the Tunisian bombing, the German police searched Mr. Ganczarski's house and found a log of his many numbers, including one in Pakistan that was eventually traced to Mr. Mohammed. The German police had been monitoring Mr. Ganczarski because he had been seen in the company of militants at a mosque in Duisburg, and last June the French police arrested him in Paris.
Mr. Mohammed's cellphone number, and many others, were given to the Swiss authorities for further investigation. By checking Swisscom's records, Swiss officials discovered that many other Qaeda suspects used the Swisscom chips, known as Subscriber Identity Module cards, which allow phones to connect to cellular networks.
The effort "involved agents from more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Britain and Italy," the Times notes. Alienating our allies indeed!
The second article, in today's Times, points out the folly of those who were pro-Saddam by proxy--that is, who claimed America's liberation of Iraq would be "illegitimate" because it purportedly lacked the approval of the United Nations.
"A group of Russian engineers secretly aided Saddam Hussein's long-range ballistic missile program, providing technical assistance for prohibited Iraqi weapons projects even in the years just before the war that ousted him from power," the Times reports. The technicians apparently weren't working for the Russian government, "but any such work on Iraq's banned missiles would have violated United Nations sanctions."
Russia has a veto at the U.N. Security Council; if it can't stop its own citizens from violating U.N. rules, what moral authority does it have to pass judgment on U.S. actions?
You Don't Say
"Students Feel Pressure to Do Well on College Entrance Exam"--headline, Dayton Daily News, March 5
Can't They Just Change the Channel?
"UPN Show Is Called Insensitive to Amish"--headline, New York Times, March 4
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Tranny Get Your Gun
"Transsexual shoots 84 in Aussie Women's Open"--headline, Associated Press, March 4
She Needed to Get It Off Her Chest
"Bust Reveals Huge Cocaine Ring"--headline, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), March 4
It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Exercises Her Right to Choose
Last year John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, sent out a memo in response to a biased front-page article on abortion. "I'm concerned about the perception--and the occasional reality--that the Times is a liberal, 'politically correct' newspaper," he wrote. "Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right."
Well, they did it again, in hilarious fashion. Blogger Kevin Roderick reports that on Feb. 24, the Times published a review of the Richard Strauss opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" which critic Mark Swed described as "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean." Only after an editor got done with it, that passage read "an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean."
The next day, the Times ran this correction (the original article, like all Times arts and entertainment articles, is available only to subscribers):
A review of Los Angeles Opera's "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" in Tuesday's Calendar section incorrectly characterized the work as "anti-abortion." In fact, there is no issue of abortion in the opera, which extols procreation.
"Swed was again not amused," Roderick surmises, "since his name was on the piece--he had been made to look stupid to his readers and to the opera community." The next day the Times published a metacorrection:
A correction in Wednesday's paper about the review of Los Angeles Opera's "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" incorrectly implied that it was the reviewer who characterized the work as "anti-abortion" in Tuesday's Calendar. As the correction should have made clear, the lead paragraph submitted by the reviewer was incorrectly changed to include the term "anti-abortion." There is no issue of abortion in the opera, which extols procreation.
Then, according to Roderick, the Times' "reader representative" put out a memo that seems to have been meant as a correction of the correction of the original correction. She implied that the acknowledgment of an editing error was itself an editing error:
Just a reminder: The Times' policy is that corrections simply correct the misinformation without assigning blame. The thinking is that readers don't care who made the mistake. Here's how the policy spells it out:
Corrections will not assign blame. (If a reporter on a story that has been corrected because of an editing error believes his or her credibility will be hurt with a source, he or she may ask an editor to contact the source to exonerate the reporter.)
Corrections should not say if it was an editing error or a reporting error, and should not imply fault to a wire service by mentioning it in the correction.
Meanwhile, did you hear about the dyslexic L.A. Times editor who changed the name of John F. Kennedy's book to "Anti-Abortions in Courage"? |
