Posted on 01/23/2004 9:19:14 PM PST by Utah Girl
Thirty-one years have passed since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. More than 43 million children have died. Yet even as the country's attitudes have shifted in favor of more restrictions on abortion, Democrats haven't shifted at all. Indeed, they have become extremists on the issue, and it may cost them, especially in the south.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted last January found that 70 percent of Americans support a ban on partial-birth abortion. Younger Americans feel even more strongly that killing a baby in the process of being born is downright barbaric. A whopping 77 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 favor the ban on partial-birth abortion signed by President Bush last year. Perhaps even more interesting, 57 percent of obstetricians and gynecologists favor the ban.
Yet not a single leading Democrat running for president does.
Sen. John Kerry is rapidly emerging as the front-runner in New Hampshire. Should he win the Granite State primary next week, it's now conceivable that he could become an unstoppable force and run away with the Democratic nomination. But how would he fare in a general election against President Bush, particularly in the South?
Kerry is already perceived as a northeastern Massachusetts liberal who will have trouble selling his Ted Kennedy-endorsed "values" in the Bible Belt. The fact that Kerry has voted against the ban on partial-birth abortion five separate times certainly won't help.
Howard Dean is another northeastern liberal Democrat who would face serious trouble in the south, if he makes it that far. He's never had to vote on the issue in the Senate. But he's made it crystal clear that he opposes the ban on partial-birth abortion signed by Bush last year. Wesley Clark hasn't ever had to vote on the issue either, but he recently told a reporter he opposed any restrictions on abortion right up to the moment of delivery.
Sen. John Edwards is trying to position himself as the Democrats' great hope to win back the South, or at least gain back some much-needed ground. And even if he doesn't win the nomination, he's increasingly being touted as a strong vice-presidential candidate. But he's seriously vulnerable on the abortion issue.
As a moderate Senate candidate from North Carolina, Edwards opposed partial-birth abortion. "I think partial-birth abortions should be banned," Edwards told the Associated Press on September 19, 1998. "These are terribly gruesome procedures."
But the very next year, Edwards flip-flopped, voting against the partial-birth abortion ban in 1999. Now Edwards the presidential candidate strongly supports abortion on demand.
Sen. Joe Lieberman has called partial-birth abortions "horrific," "abominable," and "unacceptable." On the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1999, Lieberman bluntly told his colleagues: "When you hear the description of this procedure, it is horrific. It is abominable...And then I come back to my own personal opinion, which is every abortion, no matter when performed during pregnancy — this is my personal view — is unacceptable."
Talk, however, is cheap: Lieberman has voted against the ban six times.
Conventional thinking says pro-life Republicans are politically vulnerable on the abortion issue. But times are changing: Now it's Democrats who are radically out of step with mainstream America. And it may cost them next November.
— Joel C. Rosenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of The Last Jihad and The Last Days. He was a senior aide to Steve Forbes in the 1996 and 2000 elections.
When the various states are calculated for number of abortions per capita, some states show higher rates than others. [This is also true for racial groupings, but we won’t go too much there in this screed.] If the laws governing abortion were written and enforced at the state levels, individually, and not controlled by the Roe and Casey and Doe Federal decisions (through the U.S. Supreme Court), what would be the longterm effect, statistically?
The truth is so shocking when considered, it is not a stretch to believe the DNC and liberals in general have realized the effect and thus have become even more determined to keep the Roe ruling as the law of the land!
Let’s peel the banana and take a look at the very real potentialities of repealing Roe and Doe and Casey.
In effect, what we’re suggesting is a complete reversal of what the rulings in Roe, Doe, and Casey accomplished. Those rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court accomplished the nullification of state statutes in effect that regulated abortion in the various individual states. Famous abortion related cases arose in Texas, Pennsylvania and other states, but the rulings set precedent for the nation as a whole (the Stenberg v Carhardt ruling was over a Nebraska statute banning partial birth abortion, but the effect was a nationwide prevention of such statutes taking effect in other states that had addressed the horror).
Within eighteen to twenty years, the number of citizens in the liberalized abortion states would fall behind that of the more restrictive states. As demographics shift, so does voting power! Some would argue that females in restrictive states will just drive to the more liberal state to hire a serial killer. Yes, they will, but the very presence of laws restricting the killing to only the most dire circumstances will have an influence on the developing children/teens and upon women for whom truth can still help them make life choices. Eventually, the states where restriction is signed into law will become the more populace, overall.
Can this be? Well, to check the possibility, turn to the statistics on traffic fatalities held by insurance companies. When the state speed limit is max at 65, those states realize a lesser death toll from speed related traffic deaths than states where the max is 70. It is a real effect and is reflected in costs for certain insurance products as regulated by the collected statistics. Consider another insurance related area, that of risky behavior in life insurance premiums; when risks such as smoking are factored into premiums, smokers pay higher rates because their behavior kills them earlier, on average.
Actuarial statistics are cold and impersonal. It is a fact that if the nation was moving toward a more liberal climate in the 1970’s, abortion killed off 44,000,000 potential liberals since 1973. Oh, to be sure, not all would have been liberal as they matured, but the greater number would have been because the trend was in that direction and is still in that direction, even with a significant percentage of 44,000,000 not around to bolster the liberal tides!
One final vague substantiating note: has Jesse Jackson or any other Politically motivated race peddler ever explained what the loss of so many aborted black children has meant to the demographics of blacks in American population percentages? No, and they wouldn’t dare, because what these spiritually bankrupt people have been championing for three decades has actually resulted in black people becoming a lessened demographic percent of population while other minorities have risen, minorities that didn’t practice such high rates of abortion over the same three decades.
There are other factors in demographics that effect population percentages, but actuarial tables would certainly show a paradigm shift in the nation’s population centers, over time by state, when the abortion holocaust is removed from Federal controls and returned to the states where dealing with homicide and citizens’ behavior is best addressed. The Democrat Party wants none of that sort of shift! Perhaps that’s why they work so hard to prevent any Federal judge being appointed who might question the constitutionality of the Roe decision. Oh, they’ll tell us they are trying to protect ‘a woman’s reproductive rights’, but since when is the right to hire an educated serial killer to off the already alive unborn a reproductive procedure?
I don't believe this one. I recently read an article that talked about how the death toll that was expected with the increase in speed limits hasn't materialized. I believe the article even stated that there was no difference between states that have a 65 mph speed limit and those that have a 70 mph speed limit. The article certainly showed that higher speed limits allowed in the mid-90's haven't produced the deaths that many of the worry-ninnies expected.
Furthermore, I don't believe that this particular 5 mph difference would have a real effect. I suspect that if some statistics actually show this difference, some other factor was actually controlling the outcome. For instance, if the states that set the speed limit at 65 mph are those with small populations and less traffic, the real factor is going to be the reduced traffic. If the speed limit in Maine is 65 and the speed limit in Texas is 70, you can't attribute differences in highway death rates to the speed limit without considering other factors. For instance, I suspect that there's relatively little heavy truck traffic through Maine. On the other hand, Texas has 18-wheelers rolling through the state on I-10, I-20, I-40, and I-35. The amount of traffic crossing through the state is high, and many of those drivers will be driving a long way. The heavier traffic conditions are a much greater factor than whether someone is driving 65 or 70 out on the open highway.
Otherwise, I think the point is valid. If abortion were illegal in some states and legal in others, I'm sure that there would be shifts in population and changes that some people wouldn't want.
Nah, only the Republicans are "extremist" on abortion. Surely mainstream America supports killing 9 month old unborn babies like "moderate" RATs such as Edwards and Lieberman want. Since the RATs support abortion in every circumstance, the voters must too.
We all know the wacko right-wing "extremists" lose because of the abortion issue. I hope the RATs nominate someone more "mainstream" like abortion-luving Dean for President and card-carrying NARAL member Blair Hull for Senate here in Illinois. We'll just see who "the people" find "extreme"
This is another case of statistics not telling the real story. The fuel crisis that produced the 55 mph speed limit left people without gasoline to put in their cars. Without gasoline, people drove less. When people drive less, they aren't involved in accidents. The lower death rate in those years was a result of people not driving. The lower speed limit was not the primary cause of reduced deaths. As the energy crisis eased and people began driving again, the accident rates crept back towards their original levels.
Again, the two points of my post were: 1. I am skeptical of the claim that there is a greater rate of accidents in states with 70 mph speed limits. That claim goes against another article that I've read on the subject. That article stated that accident rates declined further as speed limits were raised. 2. Even if that article was wrong and there is a statistical difference showing a greater accident rate in states with the 70 mph speed limit, the speed limit may not be the cause of the difference in accident or death rates. Just as the real cause of reduced deaths in the 1970's was lack of gasoline and therefore fewer miles driven, the real cause of a difference now likely has nothing to do with whether the speed limit is 65 or 70. Demographic trends, the nature of the traffic on those roads, and other factors are likely much more important than speed limit.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-fearf.html
Comparing the years before and after the increase in the Federal limit to 65 mph in 1987, the fatality rate dropped by 3.5% lower on all roads in the 40 states that raised freeway limits than in the 10 that didn't. Some of the benefits came from drivers switching to faster, safer interstates from dangerous country roads. Thus, analysts who ignored the non-interstates and who used total fatalities instead of rates reached the opposite conclusion. Since limits were raised from 55 to 65, the national fatality rate has declined by 34%. (US DOT)
http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/year00/march9_00.htm
Governor George E. Pataki today [March 9, 2000] released a State Department of Transportation (DOT) report that found that the safety record on New York's highways with the 65 mph speed limit have improved significantly.The report found that overall on the 65 mph system the fatal accident rate decreased by 29 percent, the total accident rate decreased by 4 percent and the injury accident rate decreased by 5 percent. The report compared statistics of the three years prior to the speed limit change with the three years after the speed limit changed in 1995.
... snip ...
... An estimate of motorists' travel time savings, using average speed data and traffic volumes in this report, indicates that approximately 4.4 million vehicle hours per year of total travel time are being saved on highways in New York where the speed limit was raised to 65 mph .
Since there's an average of 8,766 hours in a year, that translates to about seven human lifetimes saved every year.
Here are the cold, hard numbers (Note in CA, a whopping 2 in 5 babies are aborted):
(AP) - Number of abortions per state in 1996, with the rate per 1,000 women:
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