Up In The Rareified Airhead

Ross Douthat pretty much breaks my Douchebagometer with his Sunday column on abortion and statistics showing that rates of teenage pregnancy are higher in red states with abstinence-only education.  He explains that inconvenient truth away with the following:

Liberals love to cite these numbers as proof that social conservatism is a flop. But the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well. To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception. 

At the same time, if liberal social policies really led inexorably to fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions, you would expect “blue” regions of the country to have lower teen pregnancy rates and fewer abortions per capita than demographically similar “red” regions. 

But that isn’t what the data show. Instead, abortion rates are frequently higher in more liberal states, where access is often largely unrestricted, than in more conservative states, which are more likely to have parental consent laws, waiting periods, and so on. “Safe, legal and rare” is a nice slogan, but liberal policies don’t always seem to deliver the “rare” part. 

Which may be the most pedantically trite thing ever uttered by any man named Douthat in the history of Earth.  The number of abortions in blue states is an integer greater than zero, thus proving that liberals are the Anti-Life Equation.

Seriously.

He's discovered that where states contrive to legislate through completely artificial means to make the choice to have an abortion more difficult (by raising the cost of time and lost income through waiting periods, exacting a shameful emotional price through forcing physicians to talk women out of it, increasing the economic cost through ultrasound procedures and "crisis pregnancy counseling", and enforcing a scarcity cost through regulating available clinics that perform the procedure out of business to reduce if not eliminate their availability) for the sole reason of making that choice more difficult, then amazingly enough those states have fewer abortions.

The man is an unabashed genius, truly one of the greatest minds of our age.  For an encore, he'll explain how Arizona gets less yearly rainfall than Washington State and how that proves the GOP-controlled Grand Canyon State has fewer deaths caused by trees than the vile, overly liberal Evergreen State, so that there's a distinct advantage to clear-cutting the place (if only to feed all the trees to the forges at Isengard.  Job creation!) 

Soldier on, Mighty Ross. Just...watch out for those trees.