The Left is in full chortle at the expense of conservatives after results of a long-term study of children in Berkeley, California were revealed in this Toronto Star article:

How to spot a baby conservative
Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand …

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

It goes on from there: liberals are well adjusted and open-minded; conservatives are mean-sprited and have squashed souls. In other words, the complete opposite of what we see in everyday life.

Yes, it’s a truism that you can massage statistics to get any results you want, but these kids (now adults) have been monitored for most of their lives, so the results should be accurate.

So on the one hand, the study’s conclusions must be accurate, but on the other hand, they can’t be correct because they fly in the face of what we conservatives know from life experience to be true. The solution to this conflict is that there must be something unusual about the kids being studied, or where they grew up, or both.

Jonah Goldberg at Townhall.com offers what would seem to be a reasonable explanation for the results:

One obvious problem with this sort of analysis is that the single best predictor of partisan affiliation is the political orientation of your parents. In Berkeley, the most liberal majority-white city in America, most kids are going to be liberal because their parents are liberal. If one or two of the whinier kids turn out to be conservative, it might have more to do with the fact that their parents are whiny conservatives. Heck, if I lived in Berkeley, I might be whiny too.

The Dirty Little Secret

But I think the real reason is far more sinister. Let’s take it in baby steps:

• Kurt Kleiner, the reporter who wrote the Star article, didn’t specify when the kids being surveyed were born, but you can put a two-year-old in nursery school, so we’ll assume the children were born in 1984.

• In 1981, abortions topped 1.5 million and they peaked at 1.6 million in 1990 before starting the decline that’s continued to the present. So the kids in the study were born during the decade when abortion was tres chic.

• California, always the trendsetter, has had the highest abortion rates in the nation. In 2001, according to the CDC, 34% of pregnant women there aborted their babies, which put the state in the #1 ranking.

• Berkeley is located in California’s Alameda County. In 1994, there were 7,500 abortions in Alameda, more than any California county except Los Angeles, which had 31,000. According to the 2000 census, about 1,443,000 people lived in Alameda, so there were 0.005 abortions per capita. Los Angeles, with 9,519,000 people, had a per capita rate of 0.003. (I know these figures aren’t exact, since I’m mixing 1994 abortion stats and 2000 census stats, but they’re close enough.)

  Alameda County had an abortion rate that was 60% higher per capita than L.A. Hello #1 ranking!

• And finally, Berkeley’s population has been declining since 1970. Well that’s not surprising, if you live in the Abortion Capital of America, having kids isn’t going to be a priority.

Let’s wrap this up

Any child born in abortion-happy Berkeley had to beat pretty long odds to make it to the final trimester, especially during the 80s. As I see it, those poor kids in the study who were pegged as “whiny” were probably more sensitive to the “you’re not wanted here” vibe than the others who grew up to be liberals (who now also don’t want children in their lives).

I find it quite reasonable that a child growing up in the Abortion Capital of America would be whiny and paranoid. After all, just because you’re a kid with a persecution complex, doesn’t mean the residents of Berkeley aren’t out to get you. (Who knows when they might decide retroactive abortions for children up to the 30th trimester are A-OK?)

As Hillary Clinton might have put it: “It takes a village to persecute a child.”

[Update] If you want to read “The Whiny Study,” you can download it from Michelle Malkin’s site.

[Update] The Washington Post’s weblog Red America mentions a similar study released in 2003 “that was roundly mocked by conservatives for lumping the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan and Limbaugh together as socially warped right-wingers….” That study cost taxpayers $1.2 million. A footnote in “The Whiny Study” says it was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH 16080. Oh well, what’s another million out of our collective pockets….

[Update] This is interesting, I was just out checking for new trackbacks and comments at Red America and got this error:

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded – The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

Either the Washington Post seriously underestimated how popular their new weblogs would be or else they’re being slammed by spam referrals. Based on bitter experience in dealing with the same problem, I think they’re getting spammed. Welcome to the party, WaPo!

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