the benefits of legalized abortion
I've been reading Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's book Freakonomics. A particular passage strikes me as fascinating and I wanted to know what you out there think.
A bit of backstory. As you'll recall, crime and gang violence was paramount in the minds of all Americans in the early and mid 90s. Teenage violent offenders and violent crimes committed by them had risen to dangerous heights. And then suddenly, the crime rate dropped dramatically.
pg. 6
So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in history?
As far as crime is concerened, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity.
They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have reached their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had been dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.
A bit of backstory. As you'll recall, crime and gang violence was paramount in the minds of all Americans in the early and mid 90s. Teenage violent offenders and violent crimes committed by them had risen to dangerous heights. And then suddenly, the crime rate dropped dramatically.
pg. 6
So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in history?
As far as crime is concerened, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity.
They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have reached their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had been dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.