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.
As the late Richard Weaver taught, Ideas have consequences. For a change in behavior such as this reduction in the crime rate, look for a prior change in ideas. Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than a drawing back from the moral anarchism of the 1960s.
Here's another stat - if you look at the counties that have the highest abortion rate, you also find the highest amount of crime. That alone demonstrates that abortions are not causal to net lower crime.
Levitt is not really partisan, but his POV is what I'd delicately call "extra-moral."
There have been a lot of eugeniciists in our century, and many of them have been well-trained scientists. Their influence (Planned Parenthood, for one) stays with us to this day. I know pro-aborts who are virulently anti-child. I don't exaggerate when I say I have observed them writing a check to NARAL upon being disturbed at a restaurant by a screaming child... They are quite serious when they assert that some people should not be allowed to be born, and will make a bonafide (if inhumane) argument that feckless women will bring about criminal children. The more education they boast, the more detatched they behave. Having withdrawn their own DNA from the general pool, they don't believe there are many who should be allowed to reproduce.
Does Jesse Jackson know this?
There are a lot of folks in econ who will just throw out any darn thing that matches their assumptions.
1. The murder rate began to decline when the first abortion victims would have been 8 years old if born.
2. The murder rate among "wanted" post-Roe teens was a dramtic increase over the pre-Roe teens.
These directly refute Levitt's contention that the crimes were being committed by kids who would have been killed if abortion were legal. And if you go to the source link and read Sailer's article on Levitt's work, you'll find he rips it to shreds.
Perhaps Levitt isn't partisan, but that doesn't mean he's not full of crap, and very obviously full of crap.
"Early abortions were mainly done on middle class women."
I take it that your use of "early" means "shortly after Roe v. Wade." Based on that assumption, do you have any evidence for your statement?
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