Posted on 06/14/2005 7:32:22 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.
When "BreakPoint" first went on the air, crime ranked at the top of Americans' concerns. A record 2,250 homicides had been committed in New York City alone. Today, New York is on pace to record 450 or one-fifth as many homicides, and crime no longer ranks among Americans' top ten concerns.
This precipitous drop has prompted many explanations. Some of them, like better policing and the end of the "crack wars," make logical and moral sense. But there's one persistent explanation that makes no sense at all, and that is this: America is safer because of legalized abortion.
In his new book, Freakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt argues that legalized abortion is responsible for half of the recent drop in crime rates. His argument, which he has been making since 1999, proceeds from what Steve Sailer of the American Conservative calls two "plausible-sounding premises."
The first is that legalized abortion "lowers the number of ‘unwanted' babies, who would be more likely to commit crimes someday." The second premise is that crime rates began to fall just as the "first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its [crime-prone] late teen years." Thus, at least part of the fall was due to the absence of "the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals."
What Sailer calls "pre-emptive executions" sounds plausible, albeit in a disquieting way. But is it true? Only if you ignore the evidence. Much of the explosion in homicide rates during the 1980s was driven by the battles over turf that followed the introduction of crack cocaine into American cities. As the market settled, the winners no longer had to resort to murder to protect their turf.
What's more, as Sailer and others have pointed out, the numbers not only don't support Levitt's hypothesis, they prove the opposite. Crime rates during the period cited by Levitt dropped most quickly among those born before Roe. The homicide rates for 25-year-olds began falling in 1981!
It was people born after Roe who accounted for much of the increase in murder rates. During the last few years of the crack wars, the murder rates for 14- to 17-year-olds was three-and-a-half-times what it had been a decade earlier. Even in the prosperous late 1990s, the murder rate among presumably "wanted" 14-to 17-year-olds was nearly twice as high as it had been for their often "unwanted" 1980s counterparts.
Obviously something was going on that had nothing to with abortion or "wanted" children. What was it? Sailer hits the nail on the head when he points to Roe's effects on marriage and family formation. Prior to Roe, the response to unplanned pregnancy was what used to be called a "shotgun wedding." The availability of legal abortion helped convince young men that they no longer had a responsibility to the women they had impregnated. The result was a rise in out-of-wedlock births which, unlike abortion, are clearly linked to the crime rate.
As you've probably noticed, I haven't even mentioned the eugenic elements of Levitt's argument—which are horrifying—weed out the unwanted. We don't even need to go there, because the numbers tell us what we already know: No one, either inside or outside the womb, is safer because of abortion—in fact, exactly the reverse.
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I don't agree with Levitt -- I believe welfare reform was the change that brought down crime. Early aborotions were mainly done on middle class women. Levitt, unlike Gladwell, seems to do sloopy, jump to conclusions type research.
Also, with mandatory sentencing and "three-strikes" laws, the prison population in the US exploded during the time period he indicated. A lot of the bad guys are just in jail now instead of repeat offending.
He read the Cliff's notes version of Mein Kampf. When he gets around to reading the full test he'll become clearer on his final solutions.
While I hope a reasonable refutation can be developed, I fear it won't wash. It is better to make the moral argument against this newest apologia of abortion...or, perhaps better yet, to use it as a reproach.
The Aztecs were brought down inpart by their rituals of Sacrificing members of the community to solve problem. Blood was running in the "streets" until they finally figure out that the problems were not going away. But by that time they were so decimated, the conquerers just walked in and took over. (so to speak)
Abortion was illegal in the 1950s. You never locked your door or your car, and kids weren't shooting each other in schools.
The first cohort of legally aborted children was primarily the children of middle-class whites. In the mid-70s there was a welfare incentive not to abort in order to get benefits and there was a incentive among white women in the free-love 70s to abort.
Planned parenthood always pushed abortion the hardest in the inner cities, but it did not start gaining traction until the late 70s/early 80s when abortions became cheaper and more available through social programs the relationship switched.
Nowadays, middle class white women are desperate to conceive since they've avoided fertilizing a single egg from puberty to age 35, while black women are being pressured into cheap abortions by affluent white social workers.
Ping!
CULTURE OF DEATH: "Responsibility, what's that?"
The first cohort of legally aborted children was primarily the children of middle-class whites. In the mid-70s there was a welfare incentive not to abort in order to get benefits and there was a incentive among white women in the free-love 70s to abort.
Planned parenthood always pushed abortion the hardest in the inner cities, but it did not start gaining traction until the late 70s/early 80s when abortions became cheaper and more available through social programs the relationship switched.
Nowadays, middle class white women are desperate to conceive since they've avoided fertilizing a single egg from puberty to age 35, while black women are being pressured into cheap abortions by affluent white social workers.
There are a lot of folks in econ who will just throw out any darn thing that matches their assumptions. I think in the back of their mind they know that most folks won't know enough about econ to dispute their "findings."
You didn't read the whole article. There's a very effective refutation of Levitt in the second half. For example, if Levitt wants to say Roe vs. Wade is keeping the streets safe, he needs to explain why the homicide rate among 25 year olds began falling in 1981, when the first abortion victims would have been eight years old.
Yep. Levitt's theories are bunk-a-rific.
The crime rate went way down in New York City because the laws got enforced once Rudy Guiliani became Mayor. He simply enforced the laws on the books. He pushed for law enforcement on every block, from jaywalking to homicide, he pushed for all the laws to be enforced. The result was that criminals didn't have fertile grounds like they did under the so called "Democratic Mayors".
The moral of the story, is that if you are a major metropolitan city and you want to break the crime rates, vote in a Republican former prosecutor as your mayor. Democrats will just let things slide.
I don't believe Colson is trying to explain the drop in crime, just trying to convey that Levitt is not correct.
I agree there is a much bigger picture to look at.
Also, on the subject of eugenics, my criticism of US policy is that we practice reverse eugenics.
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