The following article by a Notre Dame prof shows a very limited view of why abortions dropped while Clinton was president. Did he forget about the Rep effort to reform welfare? And that is his reason to urge Catholics to vote Dem this election cycle?
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Our Conscience, Not Our Religion
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I must confess myself confused. Roche explicitly acknowledges, "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."
Moreover, why would welfare reform, insofar as the Republican version was less likely than the Democratic amendments to it to retain a safety net, reduce the number of abortions? The conservative complaint about AFDC was that it incentivized people to have children they could not support, because they were sure that the government would take care of those babies. Do you really believe that people were having less sex during the Clinton administration than during the Reagan years?
People who felt economically unable to support their children during the 1980s were able in the 1990s to do so. You can say that Clinton did not contribute to the good economy of the time, but it nonetheless enabled people to keep their children instead of aborting their pregnancies.
PG
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