Do Democratic Presidents Cause Fewer Abortions to Occur?

A closer look at the numbers behind the claim says no.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been monitoring the number of legal abortions since 1969.

The general trend was upward until 1990, with a peak of 1,429,247 abortions, and downward after that year.

Now, why was 1990 the peak? I submit (and strongly believe) that it was because the Supreme Court, in 1989 (Webster v. Reproductive Health Services) allowed significant abortion restrictions for the first time since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

It was basically a 5-4 decision: the majority being all Republican appointees (Scalia, O’Connor, Kennedy and Rehnquist), except for Byron White, who was appointed by JFK in 1962, and is the last Democrat-appointed Justice to ever vote pro-life in Supreme Court decisions in any respect whatsoever.

The more complex Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision (1992), continued this trend (at least in some respects), and so since that time, massive (now legally permissible) restrictions on the state level (overwhelmingly voted for by Republicans) have caused the numbers of abortions to significantly lower, so that in 2014 they were 46 percent of what they were in 1990 (652,639). If anyone has a better explanation, I’m all ears.

These GOP-caused reductions are occurring regardless of what party holds the presidency: especially since the Republicans have made massive gains in governorships and control of state legislatures. There are now 33 Republican governors to 16 Democrats.

But let’s get back to the rather remarkably downward trend in abortions. There are always particular anomalies in data, but the ones involved in this instance do not implicate Republicans more than Democrats.

Besides these anomalies, it had always gone up, from 1973 till 1990, and down since then. But it is clearly not the case that “it goes down during Democrats and up during Republicans.” It will continue to drop, just as it did under Obama because that is the trend, regardless of party in power. And it’s a trend … because of GOP-passed restrictions.

Even the left-leaning Snopes site (on 11-11-16) confirmed that the “decrease of abortions under Democrats” is a myth.

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