Quantifying the Roe Effect

Old Post: I originally talked about the Roe effect below.

It took me all day to do this, which explains why this is the only post today. I've been wondering about whether it's possible to quantify the Roe effect. According to Pia de Solenni's column in National Review:

Approximately 40 percent of American women under 45 have had at least one abortion. Twenty-five percent of all pregnancies end in abortion. Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, over 40 million abortions have taken place.

What I basically did was calculate what the 2000 population of each state would be if those 40 million had been born, then derive the electoral college representation for the revised population. Since I didn't have access to the complete statistics for abortions performed in each state, I used this source for the abortion rate per 1000 women aged 15-19. I took this rate to be representative, so that this rate times the total population of the state is proportional to the total number of abortions in the state over the last 30 years. (For state populations, I used the 1990 US census. Since the abortion rates were for the years 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000, I used the rates from the year 1988 for simplicity.) This gives me a set of numbers proportional to the number of abortions per state, which I normalize to 40 million. I then reapportioned the House seats for each state given the new population. Any statistician can point out the multitude of problems in this analysis: taking one year to be representative for an entire three decades (which ignores changes in demographics and abortion laws), assuming the rate for teenage girls is representative of the rate for all women, not accounting for population migration, etc. A lot of these would be solved if someone could point me to a simple listing of the number of abortions received by the residents of each state since Roe v. Wade. In any case, with my limited information, I've calculated what the electoral vote would have been in the 2000 election using the Electoral college as apportioned by the 2000 census (NOTE: The 2000 election used the apportionment of the 1990 census, so this result differs from the electoral votes the candidates actually won.), and what it would have been if the 40 million citizens had been born. This is assuming that each candidate won the same states (unlikely, considering the millions of extra voters) and received all the electoral votes from those states (not all states are winner-take-all). You'll note that if the election had taken place under the 2000 Census, Bush would have won 278 to 260. Whereas with the revised population, it would only be 270 to 268. In the table below, those states that voted for Bush are in red, and those that voted for Gore are in blue.

State	Population (thousands)	Electoral Votes	Revised Population (thousands)	Revised Electoral Votes
Alabama	4447	9	4916	9
Alaska	627	3	703	3
Arizona	5131	10	5662	10
Arkansas	2673	6	2903	6
California	33872	55	42067	59
Colorado	4301	9	4767	8
Connecticut	3406	7	4096	8
DC	572	3	814	3
Delaware	784	3	902	3
Florida	15982	27	18420	27
Georgia	8186	15	9055	14
Hawaii	1212	4	1485	4
Idaho	1294	4	1356	4
Illinois	12419	21	14200	21
Indiana	6080	11	6583	11
Iowa	2926	7	3198	6
Kansas	2688	6	2931	6
Kentucky	4042	8	4336	8
Louisiana	4469	9	4821	9
Maine	1275	4	1408	4
Maryland	5296	10	6353	11
Massachusetts	6349	12	7504	12
Michigan	9938	17	11589	18
Minnesota	4919	10	5379	9
Mississippi	2845	6	2994	6
Missouri	5595	11	6151	10
Montana	902	3	972	3
Nebraska	1711	5	1866	4
Nevada	1998	5	2255	5
New Hampshire	1236	4	1409	4
New Jersey	8414	15	10095	16
New Mexico	1819	5	2011	5
New York	18976	31	22953	33
North Carolina	8049	15	9130	14
North Dakota	642	3	684	3
Ohio	11353	20	12572	19
Oklahoma	3451	7	3758	7
Oregon	3421	7	3864	7
Pennsylvania	12281	21	13745	21
Rhode Island	1048	4	1179	4
South Carolina	4012	8	4429	8
South Dakota	755	3	793	3
Tennessee	5689	11	6237	10
Texas	20852	34	22760	33
Utah	2233	5	2327	5
Vermont	609	3	684	3
Virginia	7079	13	8110	13
Washington	5894	11	6723	11
West Virginia	1808	5	1919	5
Wisconsin	5364	10	5825	10
Wyoming	494	3	532	3

Candidate	Current Elect. College Total	Revised Elect. College Total
Bush	278	270
Gore	260	268

Update: Talk about irony. I posted this on what La Shawn Barber notes is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers.

Update: It figures. I get a link from Best of the Web and it's on a post where I messed up the Old Post, New Post scheme. It's fixed now.

Update: One of my commenters says that unless I can show that women who've had abortions have less children overall (in other words, that they don't make up for the aborted children with children later in life), then my statistics don't hold. He has a point, but it would be hard to separate that from other correlations. I think the analysis is valid as long as the abortion is treated as a form of contraceptive. The Alan Guttmacher Institute argues that most women have more children than they want, and abortion is a necessary means for keeping that from happening. Doc Rampage argues that abortion is a symptom, not a cause, of lower family size with some groups. I'd be interested in seeing more data on this, if anyone wants to point me in the right direction.