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07/21/2005: Some Abortion Theories and Anomalies to Consider...
Is this Supreme Court nominee really just about Abortion?
Froma Harrop (Houston Chronicle) suggests If Roe Goes Down, So Does GOP:”… But serious incursions on the right to abortion would change that. I wouldn't want to be a Republican politician the day that suburban mothers learn there's no legal way to end their 16-year-old daughter's unwanted pregnancy….”
But there are other reasons for the significant support for the policy allowing choice for women for abortion. There is the theory that perhaps the decrease of unwanted, unloved and aborted children has contributed to an overall reduction in crime. As Burt Constable points out in this piece If Abortion becomes a crime, criminals won’t be scarce:”… In his summer blockbuster (second to “Harry Potter”) book, “Freakonomics,” award-winning University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt replaces those anecdotal abortion conjectures with cold, hard numbers, and this provocative conclusion: “Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.”
With the help of co-author Stephen J. Dubner of The New York Times, Levitt notes that “in the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years — the years during which young men enter their criminal prime — the rate of crime began to fall.”
Looking at the myriad reasons women give for aborting a pregnancy, Levitt says: “When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. … The very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.”
The relationship between legalized abortion and crime isn’t a simple correlation or a coincidence, Levitt argues. Legalized abortion causes less crime, he says.”
Haven’t yet bought “Freakonomics” but these are some interesting "food for thought" concepts in the debate over the merits of these policies and what significant changes can bode – good or ill - for the future.
Karen on 07.21.05 @ 10:17 AM CST
