Abortion Rates and Voting Behavior

By Michael Barone
November 16, 2009

One of the consequences of the deep recession of 2007–2009, and of the high unemployment rate which threatens to become semi-permanent, is the eclipse of abortion as a political issue. Over a period of three decades abortion was a staple of political discourse, often to the discomfort of politicians. The irony is that it need not have been a national political issue at all. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade in January 1973, 16 states with 41 percent of the nation’s population had in the previous five years liberalized their abortion laws, including California (where the legislation was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan) and New York. Three-quarters of Americans lived within 100 miles of a state where abortion was generally available. At that moment in 1973, legislatures in almost every state were beginning their sessions; some of them in other states would surely have liberalized their abortion laws. We would have ended up with an abortion regime like that in Europe, where abortion is widely available but subject to certain restrictions of the sort that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional.

The abortion issue was nettlesome to many politicians in the 1970s because it split both party’s coalitions. In my home state of Michigan, the leading proponent of abortion rights was Governor William Milliken, a Republican of considerable personal wealth and a graduate of Yale. The leading opponent of abortion rights was state House Speaker William Ryan, a Catholic and supporter of labor unions whose home in Detroit was next door to a nunnery. In a state like Iowa, where Catholics were a major source of Democratic support, the abortion issue caused many of them to vote Republican, which led to the defeat of Democratic Senator Dick Clark in 1978 and his Democratic colleague John Culver in 1980. the rest