{"id":229645,"date":"2020-08-26T12:41:25","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T17:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=229645"},"modified":"2020-08-31T15:54:10","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T20:54:10","slug":"professor-solid-research-effectiveness-pro-life-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/professor-solid-research-effectiveness-pro-life-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor says ‘a solid body of research’ shows the effectiveness of pro-life laws"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As 40 Days for Life prepares to embark on a new campaign, one of its recent podcast episodes<\/a>\u00a0examined whether “electing pro-abortion politicians who enact governmental social programs save[s] lives from abortion” as well as “what actually reduces abortion rates.” 40 Days for Life president and podcast host Shawn Carney interviewed Catholic University of America’s visiting associate professor of Political Science and Social Research\u00a0Dr. Michael New<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Professor New<\/a>\u00a0holds a PhD in Political Science and a Master’s in Statistics from Stanford University, and did post-doctoral work at the Harvard-MIT Data Center. Dr. New is also the 40 Days for Life leader in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

Does increased funding for welfare programs decrease abortion rates?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carney noted, “Whenever there’s a presidential election, you see arguments that it’s pro-life to vote for an [abortion-supporting] candidate because the pro-abortion candidate will enact social welfare and economic policies that will reduce the number of abortions… Is there any truth to that?”<\/p>\n

[Editor’s Note: See here<\/a> and here<\/a> for more by Dr. Michael New on the refutation of this argument.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Dr. New answered, “No, not really. This argument comes up every election cycle and my colleagues at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and I jokingly refer to this as the whack-a-mole game. It doesn’t matter how many times we hit this argument down, it keeps coming back up again.”<\/p>\n

New then stated that there is research available on abortion rates and abortion trends from “reputable journals, both Political Science and Economics, and Public Health Journals, and people have looked at these things – public welfare programs and other kinds of low-income earners.” However, none of it<\/em>, New says, “shows that more generous benefits or universal healthcare or any kind of social welfare program really gets abortion numbers down. People have looked at this state by state, they’ve analyzed it different ways, there’s no real research that shows that [social welfare programs decrease abortion numbers].”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Pro-life laws aren\u2019t shaming women. They help to inform and keep them safe.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

New also mentioned the common theory that the abortion rate decreases under pro-abortion presidents. He says there is “no good evidence” for it:<\/p>\n

Another thing abortion supporters like to bring up is that the abortion rate fell under President Clinton, who was for legal abortion, and then they’ll bring up the fact that the abortion rate fell under President Obama, who also supported legal abortion. And they’ll come up with the backwards argument that these presidents were, you know, good for pro-lifers because the abortion rate fell. And what I tell people is that correlation is not the same thing as causation. <\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, it’s true that abortion numbers fell under both these presidents, but it wasn’t because of anything these two individual presidents actually did. What you see is a very long-term decline in the U.S. abortion rate that started in the 1980s. That decline has been consistent, it’s been durable, and it just continued through to Democratic presidential administrations. Again, it didn’t have anything to do with anything that either President Clinton or President Obama did. <\/em><\/p>\n

So the notion that electing politicians that support abortion will get abortion rates down is just a fallacy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Podcast co-host Steven Karlen, 40 Days for Life’s campaign director, then stated, “We keep hearing that if we just had ‘economic justice’ we’d see abortion disappear because the so-called ‘need’ for abortion would disappear. I scratch my head when I hear that because we live in the most prosperous society in the history of human civilization. Is it really true that further redistribution or changing of income would reduce the abortion rate, much less end abortion?”<\/p>\n