Abortion is Not the Reason for Lower Crime Rates

What is wrong with the ivory tower? The appointment of Peter ("Death to Disabled Newborns!") Singer to the bioethics faculty at Princeton University has generated considerable controversy. Recently, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford University Law School professor John Donohue III created a furor with their research paper "Legalized Abortion and Crime."

The authors contend that legalized abortion fueled the drop in crime in the 1990s because a new subclass of humanity they've identified- "women most at risk to have children who would engage in criminal activity"-have higher abortion rates, thus preemptively executing the would-be felons. This subclass, we are told, is populated predominantly by women who are teens, single and/or African American. Talk about your prenatal racial profiling! The American public is supposed to be grateful to have been spared the cost of not only the crimes, but due process, trial by jury, incarceration, appeals and execution.

The paper footnotes even the title with "preliminary and incomplete," and contains all manner of caveats on the "well recognized potential shortcomings of the [crime] data" and concedes the general impossibility of ever proving the asserted causal link with any degree of certainty. Yet it brazenly attempts to put a happy face on the achingly personal and national tragedy that is abortion. That is why articles extolling the findings are popping up throughout the pro-abortion press, while indignant editorials are questioning the authors' eugenicist leanings. It was, after all, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who established contraceptive clinics in ghettos so that "defectives" and "human weeds" could be eliminated.

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...gnant, compared to 20 percent of girls in the same age group in D.C. public schools. About 10 percent of the Best Friends participants ages 12-18 had had sex, compared to 72% of their peers.

Why the decline in crime in the 1990s? Many plausible explanations have been reported (and given short shrift by the authors), including higher conviction rates and longer prison terms which are keeping repeat offenders off the streets, more police and better policing strategies, decline in the crack cocaine trade and higher expenditures in victim precautions like security guards, alarms, car theft devices, etc.

Might I suggest another avenue of research? Let's determine what conditions lead families to produce academics who have no sense of the sanctity and dignity of human life. Some early childhood intervention in values education might really pay off.