We know the bittersweet, post-war tale of how the lives of the people of Bedford Falls were touched by George Bailey, and how different things would have been if he had never existed.

It's a great lesson of the principle that absences have consequences.

Thirty-one years after Roe v. Wade, it's impossible to imagine what life would be like if those 40 million people were among us today, but theories abound. Some hard-hearted abortion activists like to say they would largely have been a criminal class and cite their absence as one reason for the nation's decreasing crime rate. Pro-lifers are fond of suggesting that among them was the one who would have discovered the cure for cancer.

The oldest would be turning 31 this year, and odds are they would have been very much like us — going to school, getting jobs and raising families. What's more, they would have voted, and their missing votes comprise what Wall Street Journal reporter James Taranto calls the “Roe Effect.”

The theory is that the practice of abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be.

Two basic assumptions underlie the Roe Effect theory. One is that liberal women are more likely to have abortions than conservative women, and the other is that children tend to espouse the views of their parents. Thus, there are fewer and fewer children growing up to become pro-abortion adults — and this, according to the theory, has political ramifications.

The Guardian in London recently ran a story entitled “Mother Knows Best” which brings to mind the Roe Effect. The story discusses a recent study on the question of teen-agers and abortion by the University of Southampton Centre for Sexual Health. According to the study, young women tend to do what their own mothers would do in the same circumstance. Another study cited from the University of Leeds on moral decision-making and the family comes to the same conclusion: On the issue of abortion, most young women will simply internalize the view of those closest to them.

Does this contradict the memorable New York Times story, “Surprise, Mom: I'm Against Abortion”? Not necessarily. Pro-abortion baby boomers might well be baffled by their pro-life daughters, but theirs are not the only views that count. The views of those closest to teen-age girls include their best friends, too… friends who exist, odds would have it, because their own moms are pro-life, or at least because their moms didn't exercise the right to “choose” in their case. The latter holds true for the pro-life daughters of pro-abortion moms as well — and the Southampton study concluded that young women tend to do what their mothers would do.

Larry Eastland, discussing the Roe Effect recently in The American Spectator, claims it is well-settled social science that children tend to absorb the values of their parents, including their political views, and tend to develop the same lifestyle as their family. He calls children who were not born in a given year “missing voters” 18 years later, and calculates that abortions from 1973 to 1982 resulted in 12,785,800 missing voters in the year 2000. Not all people of voting age vote — in fact, only 51.2 percent of them voted in the 2000 election. With that in mind, the actual missing voters in the 2000 election was 6,033,097, according to Eastland. Do these missing votes count? In a race as close as the last one, there is little doubt. Abortions from 1973-1986 will result in 19,100,600 missing voters in this year's election, and by 2008 the figure could be 25,426,000, says Eastland. “Like an avalanche that picks up speed, mass and power as it thunders down a mountain,” he writes, “the number of missing voters from abortion changes the landscape of politics.”

How would they have voted? We get a clue from a survey done by Wirthlin Worldwide which asked, “As far as you know, has anyone close to you had an abortion?” The question included the phrase “close to you” in order to capture the people inside the respondents' circle of family and friends.

Of the 2,000 respondents, 636 people said “yes,” and an analysis of their socio-demographic characteristics revealed that Republicans have fewer abortions than their proportion of the population and Democrats have more than theirs. When Eastland matches party affiliation with the missing voter numbers above, the results are both interesting and grim: There are 14 million Republicans who are not with us today, but there are 20 million missing Democrats.

“Abortion has caused missing Democrats — and missing liberals,” says Eastland.

Sixty percent of Americans call themselves conservatives, he says, and only 25% of them are having abortions. By contrast, slightly more than one-third of Americans call themselves liberals, yet more than 40% of them are having abortions. This means that liberals are having one-third more abortions than conservatives. “For advocates so fundamentally committed to changing the face of conservative America,” Eastland says, “liberals have been remarkably blind to the fact that every day the abortions they advocate dramatically decrease their power to do so.”

Do Catholics promote large families for political reasons? The accusation is rather absurd. But if the Roe Effect is true, then the pro-abortion movement is actually killing itself.

Cathy Cleaver Ruse, Esq. is director of planning and information for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.