Does the President Matter? (Part 1)

In a discussion of Catholic voters, Notre Dame Dean Mark Roche writes:

During the eight years of the Reagan presidency, the number of legal abortions increased by more than 5 percent; during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, the number dropped by 36 percent. The overall abortion rate (calculated as the number of abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44) was more or less stable during the Reagan years, but during the Clinton presidency it dropped by 11 percent.

There are many reasons for this shift. Yet surely the traditional Democratic concern with the social safety net makes it easier for pregnant women to make responsible decisions and for young life to flourish; among the most economically disadvantaged, abortion rates have always been and remain the highest. The world's lowest abortion rates are in Belgium and the Netherlands, where abortion is legal but where the welfare state is strong. Latin America, where almost all abortions are illegal, has one of the highest rates in the world.

This is fascinating, but problematic as history. During most of the Reagan years, Democrats controlled Congress; during most of the Clinton years, Republicans controlled Congress. And neither of them were really about expanding the"social safety net" but about dismantling and reforming it, in decidedly bipartisan ways. Abortion is a social issue which is going to respond in the short-term only to legal and technological changes; social patterns change more slowly, are are rarely well bounded by presidential terms. Have you ever heard of someone considering the president in the process of deciding about an abortion?

The comparative study is also worth a second look. There are other differences between Latin America and Northern Europe besides welfare: machismo vs. feminism being the one that comes to mind first; These numbers don't control for economic effects, either, and my understanding is that abortion is generally more common among lower-income populations.

As much as I'd like every swing voter in America to pick Kerry, I can't abide bad argumentation. But Roche raises an issue that I will come back to soon: the President, and the platforms, matter less than we think.