Do Abortions Go Down in Democrat Administrations?

The United States has recently gone through (still going through) a tough election season. With abortion seated center stage among the USA's cultural conflicts, that's a prime target for people's political storytelling efforts.

Among those is the following assertion:

"The Republicans bill themselves as the Pro-Life party.  But if those fascist morons who call themselves 'Pro-Life' would just look at the national abortion statistics, they'd realize abortion numbers decrease during Democrat presidents, and hardly go down at all during Republican presidents. And that's because Democrats try to increase our social services, which allows people to not choose to abort. What fools!"

Today I want to examine this narrative.  Is it true?  

The Presidents and the Data:

So before we do anything else, let's put the data up:

Now let's talk about the trends we see.

• The stats stay relatively flat during the Reagan years.
• A decline begins in the middle of the HW Bush administration.
• This halts early on Clinton administration, leveling out.
• A second decline begins late in the Clinton administration.
• This continues till the middle of the W Bush administration
• A third decline begins late in the W Bush administration
• This decline continues through Obama's administration. 

Myself, I don't see a strong partisan narrative which can be extracted from this data one way or the other.  Declines in abortion started and ended both in Republican and Democrat presidential administrations.  

And if we could return to the rationale for why folks think Democrat administrations reduce abortions, we already showed in a previous post why the social welfare strategy doesn't hold as much water as people think.  Countries which have sterling social welfare programs still abort their kids a rate equal to or greater than the USA. 

An Alternative Explanation:

But we need not stop there, because I think there IS a strong partisan narrative which can be drawn from the data.  We just have to look a bit lower on political hierarchy;  governors.

What would happen if we put the abortion data atop a graph of the number of Republican governors in the country?  Let's see:

Well.... ain't that something.  

The number of abortions fell predominantly during times when there were high amount of Republican governors.  Why?  Because that's where the action is when it comes to abortion policy.  A high number of Republicans passing pro-life laws and driving abortion clinics out of their states reduces the numbers.

So if you want a partisan narrative, that's the one supported by the data.