Bad Science in the Service of a Lethally Racist Ideology

By Angela Franz

On August 8, the Chicago Tribune ran an article about an unpublished study written by Steven Levitt, an economist from the University of Chicago, and John Donohue III, a law professor from Stanford University. Levitt and Donohue purport to show that legalized abortion "may explain as much as half of the overall crime reduction the nation experienced from 1991 to 1997," according to reporter Karen Brandon.

The paper, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," was deemed "provocative" and "strikingly original" by several other professors, and it has been the subject of three academic workshops at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University.

The thesis of the study is that the high rates of abortion among teenagers, minorities, and the poor eliminated children who would have been "unwanted" and who would have thereby engaged in more criminal behavior.

According to Levitt, abortion "provides a way for the would-be mothers of those kids who are going to lead really tough lives to avoid bringing them into the world." They claim, among other things, that places with high abortion rates in the 1970s also had high drops in the rates of crimes in the 1990s, when the aborted children would have been reaching adolescence and early adulthood.

There are several problems with the Levitt-Donohue study. First of all, their study only demonstrates that lower crime rates chronologically followed high abortion rates, not that high abortion rates caused the lower crime rates. In logic, this fallacy is known as the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, which means that they assume that, since x happened after y, therefore x happened because of y.

Despite their protestations of neutrality, by singling out the abortion rate among poor and minority women instead of focusing on much more likely scenarios such as changes in economic prosperity within society as a whole or on changes in urban law- enforcement techniques, Levitt and Donohue reveal themselves to be deeply committed to the pro-abortion ideology.

Second, Levitt and Donohue are perhaps ignorant of the dangerously flawed historical pedigree of their "provocative" ideas. Similar "provocative" thoughts were offered back in 1925, when eugenicist and Chicago Municipal Court Judge Harry Olson said, "Crime prevention, finally, is seen to be the weeding out of defective stocks."

Judge Olson advocated not abortion but forced sterilization for those "defective" types. Not coincidentally, Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), invited Olson to participate in her 1923 Middle Western States Birth Control Conference, during which the reduction of " delinquency" (that is, the propensity to commit crimes) would be discussed.

By the 1930s, German legal and medical journals were full of " evidence" that linked the reproduction of certain kinds of people to greater crime. In 1935 Nazi medical leader Gerhard Wagner claimed that criminality was higher among Jews than non-Jews, a " fact" that helped to justify the systematic extermination of Jews.

The Levitt-Donohue study and such eugenic "findings" share several common characteristics. First, there is the predisposition to label certain classes of people - - not surprisingly, the most marginalized and powerless classes - - as predetermined, whether genetically or environmentally, to committing crimes, an approach that would lead naturally to the conclusion that those classes of people really ought not to reproduce their kind.

Second, both the Levitt-Donohue study and other eugenic "findings" are a prime example of bad science being used in the service of a lethally racist ideology. Levitt himself acknowledges that the study does not provide the kind of "certainty that, say, a scientist might want."

Indeed, the only certainty that Levitt and Donohue's study provides is the certainty that it will be used to reinforce racist ideas, including the notion that crime and other social ills are a matter of African-Americans' fertility, rather than the complacency of the comfortable.

Another certain result of the Levitt-Donohue study is that we can expect even more pressure to be exerted on poor and minority women to abort. Sanger claimed back in 1922 that "all of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working classes," while she also held that the people "who motor, who sail yachts, who legislate, who lead and control our destinies . . . do not form any part whatever in the social problems of our times."

This kind of prejudice against the poor lives on within Planned Parenthood today. PPFA's web site argues that abortion is "cost-effective," because, it claims, "For every $1.00 spent by government to pay for abortions for poor women, about $4.00 is saved in public medical and welfare expenditures incurred as a result of the unintended birth." If a hypothesized reduction in crime is added to the equation, the societal pressures that tell poor women, especially African- Americans and other racial minorities, that they have a societal "duty" to abort can be expected to continue to increase. All in all, Levitt and Donohue's work demonstrates that America's eugenic past is not so far distant and that abortion continues to be a tool for the powerful to use against the powerless.