Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast. In our Q&A segment, Ask the Coulson Center, I'm Shane Morris, host of the upstream podcast, and one of the writers for Breakpoint. I'm joined today by John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center, and the host of Breakpoint. Today we're answering your questions. These were sparked by Breakpoint commentaries, short courses, and the Colson Fellows program. If you'd like to send us a question of your own, all you've got to do is email us at ask

the Colson center at colson center.org.

Well, John, we've just passed the anniversary, a dark anniversary of the Roe versus Wade decision.

And there's a great deal of hope in the coming months.

A lot of people have sort of built up around this Supreme Court decision that's coming down early in the summer.

And this, of course, has raised questions about the history of abortion in this country and the best methods of engaging the issue and of reducing abortions in a concrete sense, because

this will by no means be over, even if the Supreme Court decides in the best way possible

for the pro-life cause and actually challenges or strikes down Roe v. Wade. So to that end,

someone has written into us asking a good question, whether it's true as sort of pro-choice

arguments often go, that the election of pro-life politicians isn't actually a good way of

reducing abortions. In other words, that elections don't really matter on this front. That's the

claim. So I'll read the question. I have a question

regarding who to vote for looking at the issue of abortion. Despite the pro-abortion views of

presidents Clinton and Obama, abortion rates went down during their presidencies far more than under

Reagan, Bush, or Trump. Does this warrant voting for pro-abortion candidates? Yeah, it's a great question.

There's been a Facebook meme that has been circulating that I think has confused a lot of people.

Interesting, if you go to Politico fact check or if you go to Snopes fact check, they both mark

this claim as at least partially false. And their big conclusion is

you cannot make these numbers equate to presidential policies. And they tend to point to three

main reasons. And then I'll add a handful of other things to consider. The first is on the reporting of numbers.

So states are not required to report the numbers.

And particularly under Democratic, the Democratic leadership, these numbers do not reflect

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