Abortion and Crime
We assume most people have heard of economist Steven Levitt's theory that Roe v. Wade has reduced crime by eliminating unwanted babies.
In the upcoming issue of American Conservative, Steven Sailer questions whether these "preemptive executions" have really reduced crime. He makes a compelling argument that they haven't. There's no link available and we can't cut-and-paste from the electronic edition we purchased (the tricky technos have crushed our efforts to violate the copyright laws!). So we'll just summarize his two major points:
1. The best test case for testing Roe's effectiveness and combating crime would be the first post-Roe children to come of criminal age. This group consisted of murderous thugs, far more so than pre-Roe children. In fact, by 1993, they had gone on the "worst youth murder spree in American history." This is especially true among blacks, who have abortions at three times the rates of whites. In 1993, black teens were 4.4 more times to commit murder than their elders ten years earlier.
2. The crime rate has fallen since 1993, but there are post-1993 factors to account for it: fluctuations in the crack business, increased incarceration, experiences among black youths (small children who saw their older siblings gunned down in the crack wars).
Sailer also points out that, if we want to look at the societal effects of abortion, we ought to take a hard look at some troubling facts:
Adoptions dropped drastically after Roe, with the result that more children grew up with irresponsible parents. It's arguably part of the permissive culture and lack of shame that Roe supports.
National illegitimacy soared after Roe, from 12 percent in 1972 to 34 percent in 2002, and the "growth didn't begin to slow until the mid-1990s, when the abortion rate declined. Why? Because young men no longer felt a moral obligation to support the child they fathered since the woman could have gotten an abortion. It was her choice to have the child, not his and not his problem. Related: Because shotgun weddings fell many young men escape the civilizing clutches of marriage that (as George Gilder has always been fond of pointing out) turns males from roguery to responsibility.
Finally, it would seem that Roe has drastically increased conceptions: "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent" (a quote by the economist Levitt). "So," Sailer says, "for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe."
