Chris Powell: Is abortion really that popular?

Bas relief at Angkor Wat, c. 1150, in what is now Cambodia, depicting a demon performing an abortion upon a woman who has been sent to the underworld

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has sent an open letter to businesses in states that prohibit or sharply restrict abortion, encouraging them to relocate to Connecticut so that their employees can get abortions more easily. He also made the appeal in an Internet video.

Business observers laughed it off, since abortion rights don't figure at all in business calculations while Connecticut's high taxes and excessive regulation figure heavily, making the state lag in economic development.

But then it was wrong to construe the governor's appeal as having anything to do with economic development. It was really aimed at Connecticut's own voters as part of his campaign for re-election. The governor sought to persuade them that abortion rights in other states are more important than the deficiencies of government in their own state.

Despite the enormous clamor about abortion, opinion polls rank it low among national issues, even as the bigger national issues are working strongly against Democrats. The governor and Democrats elsewhere hope that abortion will distract from those issues.

But the governor and Democrats in other states seem to think not only that abortion ranks high as an issue but also that most voters are as enthusiastic about abortion as the Democrats themselves are. This belief is signified by the Democrats' marquee congressional legislation, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would legalize post-viability abortion, even abortion at the moment of birth, throughout the country, going far beyond and thus nullifying Connecticut's own law, which restricts post-viability abortion.

Connecticut's intelligentsia, overwhelmingly Democratic and enthusiastic about abortion, cannot fathom contrary opinion and fails to recognize that other states have restrictive abortion laws not because of any oppression of women but because many if not most women there, benighted as they may be, are not enthusiastic about abortion.

Instead of pretending that Connecticut's liberal abortion law might draw businesses from abortion-restricting states, Connecticut's abortion enthusiasts would become much more relevant by moving to the abortion-restricting states and trying to persuade the women there of just how backward they are.

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Last week Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong affected outrage at the request made to the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority by water company Aquarion for a rate increase of 27 percent to be implemented over three years. "The last thing Connecticut families and small businesses need now is a double-digit water bill hike on top of steadily mounting surcharges," Tong said.

But inflation is raging and the company said it had not sought a rate increase in more than nine years. The attorney general took no note of this. Worse, Tong took no note of something else. On the very day when Aquarion's rate request was reported, state government imposed a 23 percent tax increase on diesel fuel, which will raise prices on everything shipped in the state.

The tax increase took full effect immediately -- it wasn't staggered over three years like the water company's rate request -- and the attorney general was silent about it. For price increases in the private sector are bad while price increases in government are OK.

After all, Tong, a Democrat, had struck his latest empty pose and achieved his uncritical publicity amid an election campaign, while sincerity in protecting the public against government's own price increase would have gotten him in trouble with his party, whose governor and legislative majority insisted on raising the diesel tax.

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The degree to which the Lamont administration has raised taxes is being disputed in the gubernatorial campaign. Republicans want to count as increases the tax cuts that were legislated by recent Democratic administrations and then repealed once an election was over and before the cuts were to take effect.

However these prematurely repealed tax cuts are classified, the practice is grossly dishonest. Additionally misleading is that the controversy is somehow failing to count the biggest tax increase of the current administration -- the half-percent increase in the state income tax to finance a family and medical leave program most people will never be able to use for their emergencies, a program whose benefits are distributed as discretionary patronage.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.