Dear Colleague:

In an apparent effort to call into question President Bush's pro-life
credentials, a researcher claims that abortions increased under his
administration for economic reasons.  But both his facts and his analysis
are flawed.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
26 October 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 33

How to Reduce the Number of Abortions
(Hint:  "Free" Government Health Care Won't Do It)

Glen Harold Stassen, Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, California, has published an opinion piece claiming
that abortions are increasing under pro-life President George W. Bush,
after declining under pro-abortion President Bill Clinton.  He attacks
Bush for being pro-life in word, but not in deed, for not offering
pregnant women "health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a
living wage." [1] The implication is that voters who want to reduce the
number of abortions should vote for a presidential candidate who will
provide the most government programs and the strongest economy, to wit,
John Kerry.

There is only one problem with this "it's the economy, stupid," approach
to abortion.  Both his facts and his arguments are wrong.  The last year
for which national abortion data are available is 2000, so Prof. Stassen
is only able to present us with scattered state data from the years since.
 And he admits that in some states the abortion rate has declined.  As Dr.
Randy O'Bannon, director of education at the National Right to Life
Committee has convincingly shown, "some of his statistics are just flat
wrong, while others are of ambiguous origin." [2]  O'Bannon demolishes
Stassen's thesis (for details, visit
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/stassenpart2.html).


Let's take his specific arguments one by one.  First, he talks about how
bad the U.S. economy is.  But the unemployment rate now is just about what
it was in 1996, when Clinton was up for reelection, and the economy is
actually growing at a faster rate.  At that time, the liberal media were
telling us how wonderful the economy was.  Now, of course, they have been
collectively struck by amnesia.  This has a lot more to do with their
electoral preferences than with economics.  They by and large supported
Clinton in 1996.  Now they are doing everything they can to diminish
Bush's standing with the voters, including by publicly endorsing Kerry.

Second, he implies that the state of the economy is so dismal that it
discourages men from marrying.  But he provides no evidence of a fall in
the marriage rate over the past four years.  And that this in turn
encourages abortion on the part of partner-less women.  But what women
need to raise a child is not a "partner," but a permanent mate.  The root
cause of the unwillingness of men to commit is the sexual revolution,
which has weakened the bonds of matrimony and life-long monogamy as an
ideal.  Healing the institution of marriage must be a priority if the
abortion rate is to come down and stay down.  This is less a matter of
economics than of cultural and spiritual ideals.  In this Bush, with his
spirited defense of marriage, is a force for the good.

Third, Dr. Stassen implies that by socializing medicine--that is, by
providing "free" health care to all--abortion rates will go down.  This
argument is disingenuous because in every case where socialized medicine
has been instituted, abortion rates go up--way up.  The reason is simple:
The bureaucrats in charge want to keep their costs down and so they
institute policies to encourage abortions, which are cheaper (over the
short term) than live births.  Look at Canada, England, Sweden, etc.

We should also bear in mind that while socialized medicine may be "free,"
it is not cheap.  Taxes would have to be raised considerably on all
members of the working population to pay for it.  By reducing the
disposable income of young couples, higher taxes make them much less
likely to bear children. This not only drives down the birth rate, it
increases the abortion rate. In Italy, where the average person pays 50
percent of their income in taxes, half of all second children are aborted,
and 90 percent of all third children are aborted.

Dr. Stassen tells us that he and his wife refused to abort their unborn
child following his wife's bout with rubella eight weeks into her
pregnancy, and have raised a handicapped son.  At the same time, he
apparently fails to realize that under a system of socialized medicine the
pressure to abort a potentially handicapped child would have been
considerably more intense, and parents would have no alternative plan for
health care to fall back on.  China's state-run medical clinics are under
orders to eliminate all handicapped children in utero or at birth,
regardless of the desires of the parents.

Let us also not fail to remember that, when Bush took office in January
2001, he inherited an economy that was on the verge of recession.  The
attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could very well have
stalled the economy.  The rising price of oil could have sent it into a
tailspin.  But that is not what happened.  Millions of new jobs have been
created.  The U.S. economy has outperformed that of Japan, the U.K.,
Germany and other large developed countries these past four years.  This
has happened for one simple reason: tax cuts.

Instead of enacting the expensive new programs that Dr. Stassen
proposes--socialized medicine, government-funded child care, a federal
jobs-creation program--Bush decided to allow the American people to decide
for themselves how to spend their hard-earned money.  He sent everyone a
tax rebate check, and lowered tax rates across the board.  Americans have
used this income to create more income, and more wealth, not just for
themselves but also for all Americans.  This jumpstarted the faltering
economy in 2001, and has kept it moving in the years since.

Economic policy and abortion are indeed intertwined, as Dr. Stassen
suggests.  Without the Bush tax cuts, the economy could very well have
gone into recession in 2001.  The unemployment rate would have doubled,
with millions of jobs permanently lost, and few new ones created.  And
abortion rates would undoubtedly have gone up nationwide.

The best way to support families with children, both born and unborn, is
to keep the economy strong and their taxes low.  As much of their income
must be safeguarded from the state as possible.  Parents, not the nanny
state, know best what the needs of their children are.


Endnotes
[1] The article is available at
http://raymondpward.typepad.com/rainman2/2004/10/prolife_look_at.html.
Dr. Stassen can be reached at gstassen@fuller.edu.

[2]"Where are the fruits? Why Stassen's claims that Bush's policies
increased abortion are baseless by Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D., Director of
Education & Research and Laura Hussey, M.P.M., Special Research Assistant,
National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund. At
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/stassenpart2.html

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