The Form of Money :: Abortion and Crime

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

This gaffe on "black babies" should have been "unwanted babies". What this gaffe implies is that Bennett associates black babies with crime, a Freudian slip of particular insight. And since he mentioned Freakanomics, here's the Freakanomics excerpt:

Freakanomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, 2005, Excerpts

When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident had they been of its continuing rise. A diverse army of experts now marched out a phalanx of hypotheses to explain the drop in crime. A great many newspaper articles would be written on the subject. Here, ranked by frequency of mention, are the crime-drop explanations cited in articles published from 1991 to 2001 in the ten largest circulation papers in the LexisNexis database:

1. Innovative policing strategies

2. Increase reliance on prisons

3. Changes in crack and other drug markets.

4. Aging of the population

5. Tougher gun control laws

6. Strong economy

7. Increased number of police

8. All other explanations [increased us of capital punishment, concealed-weapons laws, gun buybacks, and others]

One of the greatest measurable causes of the crime drop does not appear on the list at all, for it didn’t receive a single newspaper mention. In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances: rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970 five states had made abortion entirely legal and broadly available: New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. On January 22, 1973, legalized abortion was suddenly extended to the entire country with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade.

The Supreme Court gave a voice to what the mothers of Romania and Scandinavia – and elsewhere – had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

Before Roe v. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middle or upper class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, and woman could easily obtain an abortion, often less than $100.

What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors – childhood poverty and a single-parent household – are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.

The most dramatic impact of legalized abortion was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years – the years during which young men enter their criminal prime – the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.

It may be comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring.

What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can’t, she often chooses abortion.

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