June 14, 2005
PRE-EMPTIVE EXECUTION
You know you have heared it all when you see a case made for abortion because it reduces crime by pre-emptive execution.
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."Eugenics indeed, this is a horror that would destroy the human soul.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.
UPDATE: More analysis here.
Posted by Sid at June 14, 2005 12:30 AM | Abortion
