Fewer kids means fewer teachers, so why aren't teachers' unions pro-life? This data is as-of 1995:
In this sense, abortion-on-demand already has produced a negative economic effect. In his book, "The Cost of Abortion," researcher Lawrence Roberge correlates the legalization of abortion with a slowdown in the production and sales of child-related items. He also estimates that the loss of millions of children to abortion thus far has precluded creation of between 950,000 to 1.2 million teaching jobs.
Considering how fiercely teachers' unions fight to protect their members, it's strange that they dropped the ball on this one.
It's the short-term focus. The union is just a vehicle for the individuals who run it to enjoy money and power. They have no reason to care about what happens more than 10 years from now.
We see the same thing in politics. The Republicans had their chance to enact the conservative policies they ran on, but the benefits of those policies wouldn't have provided much benefit to the individual policians. So they lapsed into short-term pork-barrel spending.
And now Obama is facing the same problem: The Democrats have a huge opportunity to cement their power for decades, much as they did in the thirties and the sixties. But it's rapidly falling apart because most of the individual Democrats don't care about their party's long-term future. They just want pork for their districts.
There's nothing strange about this. It's human nature to focus on the short term. What's unusual is for people to put aside their short-term preferences for some higher goal.