ABORTION AS "BENEFICIAL SOCIAL CLEANSING"

"Fewer Poor Born to Break Law"

August 10 Washington Post headline, referring to a study linking abortion and reduced crime written by Steven Levitt and John Donohue

"A myopic scholarly paper turns into a sensational story, once you've substituted the words 'potential criminal' for 'unwanted child.' Send it out over the wires around the world, it becomes another bomb that shock-jocks and schlock politicians can lob at the poor."

Amy Pagnozzi, Hartford Courant, August 13

"Making abortion freely available to young poor women is an effective method of reducing the number of potential street criminals."

Former Minneapolis police Chief Tony Bouza in his book, The Police Mystique.

"How does she [Hillary Clinton] react to the Levitt-Donohue study? It's important, because if the study's implication - - that abortion is beneficial social cleansing - - is not vigorously contested, then the progressive mind-set that smiled on sterilization is still with us."

"Hillary Clinton-style Social-Work Liberalism Has Some Dark Areas," by Alexander Cockburn, Los Angeles Times

Granted, it's as pleasant as trekking bootless through a mosquito-infested swamp. Nonetheless, I hope by now NRL News readers have taken the time to slosh through the mire created in early August when the Chicago Tribune favorably reported on an 63-page paper authored by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford Law Professor John Donohue which argued that abortion reduces crime.

Because the waves of controversy over "Legalized Abortion and Crime" first crashed just a couple of days before our last press deadline, we were able to run a helpful but necessarily brief look. (See NRL News, 8/10/99, p. 27. The article can be found, read, and downloaded on the web at www.nrlc.org/news/index.html.)We return this time with this editorial and the brilliant observations of Susan Wills that appear on page 29.

L&D's thesis first oozed its way to the surface when a copy was provided to the Chicago Tribune. As the Tribune summarized it in its August 8 story, the gist was, thanks to Roe and the unleashing of the killing machine, that "those who would have been at greatest risk of criminal activity during the peak crime years of young adulthood - - the unwanted offspring of teenage, poor and minority women - - were aborted at disproportionately high rates [beginning] more than two decades ago."

Levitt proudly told Karen Brandon of the Tribune that "no one will like it." Holding aloft the banner of the disinterested pursuit of truth, he harrumphed, "I don't think it's our job as economists or scientists to withhold truth because some people are not going to like it." Then for good measure, he added, " I just think it's important to understand the impact of social policies."

But the question can be fairly asked, is our response overkill? Can't the "chillingly simple" connection (as the Economist put it) that says we have less crime "because many of the children who might have grown up to commit those crimes never were born," be likened to a meteorite that briefly flashed across the horizon, lit up the evening skies, but now is gone.

After all, the argument they make for prenatal capital punishment could have been penned anytime in the last 150 years by the likes of Margaret Sanger or a thousand other eugenicists eager to "prove" that everyone - - especially the "unfit" themselves - - are better off if fewer of them are around. And didn't the paper made its way into the public consciousness before it had even been peer reviewed?

For that matter, hasn't Levitt himself subsequently assured one critic that "I would never deny that legalized abortion is only one factor among many that affect crime rates"? And, finally, haven't those with the background to plow through the statistics and footnotes L&D cite disarticulated the thesis or put it in serious jeopardy? In other words, aren't we running the danger of making a mountain out of a molehill?

In a word, no. L&D's thesis can be better likened to a San Francisco earthquake. Repeatedly, over the course of a century, the city has been jolted when tectonic plates grind up against one another. Because San Francisco sits so close to a fault line one can know with mathematical certainty that such havoc will occur over and over again. And, finishing the simile, most every time there is a seismic disturbance, there will be aftershocks.

The operative sentence in L&D's paper, first posted on the Social Science Research Network Electronic Library, is that "legalized abortion can explain about half of the recent fall in crime." The mechanism of this preemptive attack on crime is "selective" abortion.

"Children born to these mothers [teens, poor women, and minority women] tend to be at higher risk for committing crime 17 years or so down the road," they argue, "so abortions may reduce subsequent criminality through this selective effect." (Interestingly enough, they attribute the other half of the drop in crime to the fact that more people were locked in prison, a conclusion that has received virtually no comment.)

Unfortunately, there is not enough space available to properly explain the gaping holes and fatal flaws in their work. Moreover, we need some space to discuss the ominous implications of the uncritical reception so many social scientists and newspaper reporters gave to a paper not yet even academically reviewed. Just a few thoughts, largely lifted from others.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal August 19, Ramesh Ponnuru astutely observed that Britain's crime rate was rising 20 years after abortions were first legalized. Russia, meanwhile, aborts 7 of 10 pregnancies and is today wracked by what appears to be a wave of terrorist bombings.

Joel Brind, Ph.D., who writes frequently for us about abortion and breast cancer, notes that L&D's is a correlation study only, which may have as much validity as the old joke about how when ladies' hemlines went up, so did the stock market. Pointing to the definitive critique, made by Steve Sailer in a debate with Levitt that appeared on the online magazine Slate, Brind suggests that a much better explanation for the decline in crime, especially murders, is the waning of the epidemic of crack cocaine and the arrival of a booming economy that persists to this day.

In a memorable August 23-24 online debate with Steven Levitt, Steve Sailer simply pulverizes L&D's original thesis and then proceeds to ground Levitt's rebuttals to dust. Right out of the box, Sailer points out that by focusing on the crime rates only in the years 1985 and 1997, L&D missed altogether "the 800 pound gorilla of crime trends: the rise and fall of the crack epidemic during the intervening years."

Sailer observes that the logic of legalized abortion=lower crime is that those "who managed to get born in the '70s should have grown up to be especially law-abiding teens in the early '90s." In fact, "when the first generation to 'benefit' from being culled by legal abortion reached ages 14-17, they went on a homicidal rampage."

Pointing to FBI crime statistics, Sailer explains that the "murder rates for 1993's crop of 14-to-17-year-olds [who were born in the high abortion years of 1975-1979] was a horrifying 3.6 times that of the kids who were 14 to 17 in 1984 [who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966-70]."

Warming to his task, Sailer further rejoins that "in utter contrast" to Levitt's logic, "the murder rate for 14-to-17 year-olds even in the low crime year of 1997 was 94 percent higher than it was for 14-to-17-year-olds in 1984. Yet, over the same span, the murder rate for 25-to-34-year-olds (born pre-legalization) has dropped 6 percent."

Not that many pro-aborts will pay an ounce of attention. They have already gleefully embraced L&D. Their paper reinforces one of their pet defense mechanisms - - that abortion is really an act of kindness. However, some of the more savvy, such as Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, nervous about the racist implications, tried an end-around. They insisted the issue was not abortion but "unwantedness." The real story of the L&D paper, Goodman argued, is what people like her have always said: Kids planned and wanted and provided for turn out better!

Indeed, the study does show that women who aborted did not fail to have subsequent kids. Quite the contrary, they had higher fertility rates. So, according to L&D, the lower crime rate could have resulted because of two mechanisms working in tandem. The first is "selective" abortion by those women most likely to produce criminal offspring. Second, because woman were able "to choose better timing for child-rearing," it "lower[ed] criminality."

We've already addressed the first part. The gaping weakness with the second part of this hypothesis is that, for all intents and purposes, it is pure speculation. It is simply assumed to be an immutable truth of nature. But truth, of course, is not the issue.

Suggesting that control is the real issue, not snuffing out feloniously-inclined unborn babies, provides a fig leaf. L&D (and those pro-abortionists who want to use the hypothesis to further their own agenda) can then piously contend that the policy implications of their paper have nothing to do with race or the "wrong" people reproducing.

But if we've learned anything from nearly being drowned in 30 years of misinformation, it is surely that pro-abortionists will use anything to "prove" that abortion is a plus. That most certainly includes appeals to our baser instincts. For instance, to her credit, Ellen Goodman understands the stench of racism that reeks from the L&D hypothesis. But no sooner does she observe that "pro-choice leaders are particularly uneasy at any link among race, class, abortion and crime," than she adds, "but it has the whiff of common sense." Literally, they can't help themselves.

How ironic that this whole debate should irrupt just when reports are coming to light about the eugenicist mentality that ran amuck earlier in this century in Vermont. Alexander Cockburn, writing in the Los Angeles Times, put it this way: "As in many other states progressives with a devout belief in the ability of science to improve Vermont's gene pool lobbied successfully for passages of a sterilization law in 1931. The law targeted poor, rural Vermonters, Abenaki Indians, and others deemed 'unfit' to procreate."

The stakes are enormously high. One the one hand, as sociologist Vivian Martin phrased it, writing in the Hartford Courant, "Studies like these tap into deep racism and other biases in the culture and set off a ripple of unintended consequences, even the shaping of public policy." On the other hand, after predicting "persistent declines of 1-2 percent a year in crime over the next two decades," Levitt and Donohue bemoan that "to the extent that the Hyde Amendment effectively restricted access to abortion, however, this prediction might be overly optimistic."

In his original August 8 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Levitt's partner, John Donohue, made this telling observation. "I was just stunned at the magnitude of the abortion relative to births. It's such a huge number [between one in four and one in three babies have been aborted, depending on the year] that it has to have had some big impact somewhere." Indeed, it has, but in a far different way than Levitt and Donohue have persuaded themselves is true.

Sailer offers a "more speculative, but also more frightening" way of explaining the relationship between abortion and crime/violence, one that pro-lifers will find utterly persuasive:"The revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born."

(dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com)