-Caveat Lector-
August 19, 1999
Abortion Is Not
The Answer to Crime
By Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National
Review.
Why have crime rates been falling in the 1990s?
Criminologists have suggested a number of possible
explanations. The end of the crack boom, the strong
economy, tougher sentencing policies, better policing
techniques, and state laws letting law-abiding citizens
carry concealed handguns have all been mentioned.
Now two researchers are advancing yet another theory:
The legalization of abortion in the 1970s, they say, may
be responsible for about half of the drop in crime in the
1990s. The reason we aren't being terrorized by more
20-year-old thugs, in other words, is that they were
aborted 20 years ago. It turns out that the death penalty
stops crime after all.
The notion that abortion solves social problems has
always been implicit in the pro-choice movement's
rhetoric about the perils of bringing "unwanted children"
into the world. Steven Levitt, an economist at the
University of Chicago, and John Donohue III, a professor
at the Stanford University Law School, have merely
added some statistics to that intuition in an unpublished
paper. Their main evidence seems to be that states that
had high abortion rates in the 1970s have seen the most
dramatic drops in crime now, and that states that
legalized abortion earlier began to see those drops
earlier too.
Obviously, a society that has 39 million abortions will
have 39 million fewer potential criminals--and 39
million fewer potential crime victims, policemen,
moviegoers, taxpayers and so forth. But Messrs. Levitt
and Donohue point out that the aborted children would
have been more likely than average to become criminals,
both because of their mothers' demographic
characteristics--disproportionately black or Hispanic,
poor and teenaged--and because of their unwantedness.
Are Messrs. Levitt and Donohue right? To say for sure,
we would have to know what would have happened to
crime rates if abortion had stayed illegal, and social
science cannot construct such counterfactual histories.
We might conceive, for instance, that less abortion would
yield more illegitimacy. But in fact, abortion and
illegitimacy rates rose in tandem in the 1970s and have
been falling in tandem recently.
There are other reasons to question the scholars'
conclusion. Britain's crime rate was rising 20 years after
abortion was legalized. Russians abort seven out of 10
pregnancies, and their society is not noticeably safer as
a result. It's possible, also, that the legalization of
abortion increased crime by undermining respect for the
sanctity of life, although any such effect would be hard
to measure.
Does it matter if Messrs. Levitt and Donohue are right?
Cory Richards, vice president for public policy at the
pro-abortion rights Alan Guttmacher Institute, told the
Chicago Tribune that the study "is an argument for women
not being forced to have children they don't want to
have," which is to say for allowing abortion. But in fact,
the findings shouldn't affect our view of abortion at all.
If we can determine that an unborn child has a good
chance of becoming a criminal, presumably we could do
the same for a five-year-old. We could then eliminate all
five-year-olds with budding criminal propensities. Or we
could really take preventive action, and sterilize women
who have a high risk of bearing such children. But while
Margaret Sanger might have approved, nobody today
would propose these eugenic policies, except in a
Swiftian vein. Or we could identify adults who are more
likely, on the basis of some characteristic, to be
criminals and take precautionary action. Oh wait, we
already do that: It's called racial profiling, and Vice
President Gore just described it as a hate crime.
The argument that abortion should be tolerated because it
reduces crime will be persuasive only for people who
already favor tolerating abortion for other reasons. It
will not impress people who think abortion ought to be
considered a crime itself.
There seems, however, to be a modern tendency to expect
science to resolve difficult moral questions for us. Just
the other day a justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court
ruled that "decades of social science" had established
that homosexuality is not immoral. Science, even social
science, has accomplished many things, but it cannot tell
us what is right or wrong. It cannot tell us how we ought
to live. And it cannot tell us what we should do about
those dangerous characters lurking in the womb.
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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