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During the Roe v Wade court arguments, one of the key components was the age of viability, which seems to be what you're bringing up here.

I'm actually not really thinking in terms of 'viability', to be honest. I'm thinking purely in terms of outcomes.

I personally don't feel that every human life will be a good thing to have around. If, say, a crack-addicted mother is going to have 10 kids, and 9 of them will grow up to be thieves, to me it would have been better if all of them had been aborted. Purely hypothetical, of course. But that's my thinking.

Adoption certainly is one possible solution. But short of forcibly removing children from unfit parents, that doesn't seem to be an option that is chosen most of the time. People who do not want the babies will abort them. If they don't, and are forced for whatever reason to carry the baby to term, they seem very reluctant to give the baby up for adoption many times. I don't get it, but that seems to be the case.

Cold hearted, yes. That's one of the knocks often levelled against those of us who believe in a conservative use of federal power. Like our stances on welfare, and crime, and war, and the border, and illegal immigrants, and the death penalty, and . . .

The simplest explanation is the best. Crime rates declined in the early 90's because the economy was better.

It was an excellent book. Levitt, the guy who did the numbers analysis, is something of a genius and had some good data behind the theory. But it is just a theory, of course. But I think that is one of the simplest answers. Aborted babies are unwanted babies, with parents typically unable to raise those kids right. Children in those circumstances are at a high risk of growing up to be criminals.

It's a fascinating book. There's one chapter analyzing names, and how people turned out. One poor black family in NYC named one kid 'Winner' (they called him 'Win') and one kid 'Loser' (they called him 'Lou'). 'Win' grew up to be a career criminal, and 'Lou' grew up to be a cop. They also submitted identical resumes for jobs, one with a name like 'Judy' and another with a name like 'LaShandra'. The normal 'Judy' names got invited for interviews far, far more often.

Cool book.