Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Also, as a side note, if considers abortion to be morally unjustifiable and wants to reduce crime, then good ways to do this would be to make contraception more accessible, to implement comprehensive sex ed everywhere, and to create a stronger social safety net.
I agree but I want to add that there should also be better role models for the young people who are most likely to get pregnant and want an abortion. There is so much peer pressure to have sex as well as in the media, music, tv, movies, and books. In those same communities so many mothers raising families were unwed themselves and had babies at a young age so their daughters may grow up to do the same thing. Where are the respected trusted role models convincing them to say no? They don't seem to exist, not to mention the young men often do not like to wear condoms and may brag about getting a girl pregnant instead of trying to avoid it.
I didn't have the time this morning to read every link. However, I have much respect for the Economist as a publication (I subscribed for 3 years). So, I read the article. The article doesn't particularly dispute Levitt and Dubner's conclusion that legalized abortion lowered the crime rate. Rather, it expresses skepticism and presents other viewpoints.
What I personally find convincing about Levitt and Dubner's conclusion is the following:
1. Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973.
2. The crime rate in the USA began to drop noticeably in 1994, when the first fetuses aborted would have been about 20 to 21 years of age (peak ages of criminality).
3. The drop in crime was across the board. You could chart a small, but steady decline in virtually every category of both violent and non-violent crime that has persisted from 1994 to present.
4. Crime statistics have never shown a reversal of this trend since 1994.
5. Other factors which are alleged to have caused a decrease in the crime rate (such as minimum mandatory prison sentences) had been in place in many places long before 1994 and crime continued to increase.
Its the rare child born in ghetto who becomes an Albert Einstein. Einstein himself was born to what I would describe as upper middle class parents in Germany. Einstein's father was head of an electric company. I looked up Mother Teresa and not much seems to be known about her early life. What was mentioned is that her father was a politician. I would submit that the vast majority of famous and influential people stand on the shoulders of parents who had above average accomplishments in life. The idea of "eugenics" or only breeding people with certain jeans is a fallacious argument. Environment is a critical influence. Part of the formula for success in life is inheriting a good environment.
I don't think a world could or should be created where only the wealthy and bright are permitted to breed. However, that isn't the issue. The issue is allowing women who do not believe they can be good parents or who do not want to be parents to terminate their pregnancies.
I think one of the main reasons the children in the ghetto do not grow up to become an Einstein is because of the horrible schools in the inner cities across America. I also do not think they are encouraged enough to apply themselves to their studies.
First of all let me say that I don't advocate or promote abortion. I had an unplanned pregnancy myself and chose to keep my baby and I love her. This Donahue-Levitt hypothesis does however, makes a lot of sense to me. It shows that 18 years after roe v wade legalized abortion in the US the crime rate began dropping sharply and nothing else seemed to account for it. The theory goes that children that grow up unwanted and unloved are more likely to become criminals so that after abortion was legalized those children were simply not born which lead to a sharp drop in crime. They also compare the US to Romania where a law was passed making abortion illegal from 1966-1989 it shows that in that country the children grew up to perform in life more poorly than expected.
I don't think abortion should be used as birth control, but if children are born they should be loved and well cared for. Every child deserves that. How can we as a society help make that happen so they are more likely to grow up to function well in society as adults?
Question: did the crime rate drop off sooner in states that legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade (1973)? My own state of CA went abortion-on-demand in 1967, under then Governor Reagan no less, six years before.
Of course, California also has had a large influx of immigration, often illegal, that has altered crime patterns.
It will be a relief for many women when misoprostol is cheaply synthesized and as available as Tic-Tacs. The end of surgical abortions means the end of conservative bullying and continued choice for women.
As opposed to the Left bullying of private organizations and freedom of religion. Can you force a doctor or provider to perform or fund abortions when s/he or it does not want to do that?
Last edited by NickB1967; 05-05-2014 at 09:49 AM..
Really? I find it hard to believe anyone who thinks about this topic for more than 5 seconds would believe that.
There is no one using abortion as a form of birth control. Even with the earliest sort that are just a pill, the side effects are still going to be very unpleasant and painful, it's generally hundreds of dollars, and there aren't many abortion providers around, so it's going to take a bunch of time. Later abortions are an actual medical procedure and even worse.
In contrast, the various forms of contraception are readily available, largely cheap, and should you expect one of those failed, today "Plan B" is also available over the counter, and certainly is again, far cheaper and easier.
With all due respect, yes, they do. and I can't believe you can't grasp *that*.
Why? Because by the time a woman is "a month late" (and I don't mean paying the bills), she is past the point of an abortifacient pill (which itself is extremely nauseating and at all pleasant). So at that point the abortion almost always *is* a form of birth control.
And no, I can't compel a woman to have a child she does not want either. But almost all abortions today are yes, birth control after the fact because initial birth control failed.
This is especially true for the neglectful and irresponsible demographic that presumably will birth and badly misnurture the future criminals. They aren't responsible enough to pay the bills or not take bad drugs, and not moral enough to not steal; why do we expect them to diligently take the Pill or use condoms? For them, abortion is after the fact birth control.
Last edited by NickB1967; 05-05-2014 at 09:42 AM..
Well, to be fair, one might be able to make a case that getting abortions in order to prevent disabled offspring from being born is a form of eugenics. For instance, I think I heard that around 90% of Down's syndrome embryos/fetuses are aborted.
Spina bifida and cystic fibrosis have declined greatly as well, largely due to prenatal screening and the subsequent abortions.
those who try to block access to contraceptives through group insurance.
Sorry, but when so many young ladies spend far more on their *cell phones* each month than on the necessary birth control, this does not fly.
Q: What is Group Insurance for?
A: Major Financial Catastrophe. NOT routine and minor costs. The most surefire way to make health insurance utterly unaffordable is more and more not serious items be covered by it. A woman getting her routine birth control pills, is not a major financial blow. A woman getting breast cancer, or hit by a truck, and needing serious surgery or hospitalization, is.
What would your car insurance cost if every oil change had to be provided by it? And what would the oil changes cost when a 3rd party was paying for them, taking away the useful shopping around for the best price deal? The answer is a hell of a lot more, both times.
(If routine and minor costs are frequent enough, perhaps medical savings account deals can be set up to pay for them)
And once again, I am hardly anti-choice, but since this thread was about Freakonomics ("Freaky economics"), we must look at what birth control actually costs. It's not expensive surgery, nor a newly patented and thus more expensive wonder drug.
Last edited by NickB1967; 05-05-2014 at 09:48 AM..
No, your births were unintended. Once you were conceived, your parents, by your own description, provided a loving home for you. That means you were wanted.
In the US, about half of all pregnancies are unintended:
No, as I stated in my post: my conception and birth was not wanted, and this is also true of my brother and sister. We were conceived accidentally.
In a prior post, I noted that I am an old man, both by age and mileage. When our conceptions took place, abortion was illegal (as it had been for millennia); i.e., it was a crime. Had abortion been legal, I highly suspect that I would not be writing this post, because I could have been legally aborted. And I believe the same holds true for my brother and sister.
However, we exist because even though we did not have a voice or a vote, we were given a chance to live.
Moreover, though we were not wanted at the time of our conception, we all felt wanted and loved growing up. As a result of being given a chance to live, our children exist as do our grand children.
As I said in an earlier post: "If you are not given a chance to live, you have no chance whatsoever."
With an abortion ban in place, women with money will just go some place where abortion is legal. That places the burden more on women without the financial means to travel. Prior to Roe v. Wade, there was no way to accurately tally illegal abortions, though I have seen estimates of 1,000,000 per year in the US. Making abortion illegal would not reduce the number performed as much as you might expect. Also, you can already buy the drugs used for medical abortion online. Drive abortion underground again and there would be no way to police that.
Here's a dirty little secret. If Roe v. Wade is overturned (and from a strictly legal perspective, it probably should be, as judges are supposed to interpret law and not make it up; even quite liberal law professors like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz have stated this), there really will not be that much difference at all.
Why? Because if that happens, the issue gets kicked back to the states, as it was before the infamous 1973 Roe decision. In the 30 odd years since then, inertia has set in and the burden to change legislation about abortion would be on the "pro-life" side.
In the states that are likely to restrict or ban abortion (about 20 of those, tops, in the Intermountain region, rural Midwest, and South other than Florida), there are hardly any abortion providers to begin with, and those seeking abortions have to go some distance to get them.
The only state I can even possibly see banning abortion that has many abortion providers in its cities is TX, and I wouldn't even be sure they would. Even a good many people who are staunchly Right/Conservative/Republicans on the "guns and butter" issues are *not* that enthuisastic about banning abortion, not if the electoral fallout that would result from an anti-abortion jihad caused Republican politicans who they like (anti-tax, pro-business, pro-defense) to lose.
That may even go for many other Right/Conservative/Republican areas of the United States. The Libertarian / Tea Party "leave me and my guns and my existing insurance alone", possibly even growing weed in the backyard, sort of Conservative Republican, is a different political species than the Bible believing social conservative sort.
The overwhelming providers of abortions are located in states that have practically enshrined abortion as a "right", or are otherwise quite accommodating. Those states are the West Coast, the Eastern Seaboard, and the "Rust Belt" Upper Midwest (MI, MN, WI, IL).
For all the talk about rights, be they to "life" or to "choice", the reality is that abortion is not a concept in the way that the right to express oneself politically without government sanction, or the right to peacefully express one's beliefs without government sanction, are concepts. Abortion is (1) a medical procedure that (2) requires a doctor and clinic willing to perform it.
Vast swaths of these United States lack any abortion providers, particularly in rural areas. Women seeking abortions in those areas face a long car or bus trip as it is.
This is even true of many American cities and towns. Are there any abortion providers in UT or ID, outside of maybe Salt Lake City or Boise, and even that might be iffy? Women seeking abortions there are probably already likely to take a trip down Interstate 15 or Interstate 90 to "Sin City", Lost Wages, Nevada, or to Spokane if not Seattle. Likewise in other places. I doubt those seeking abortions in the Dakotas find them anywhere closer than Minneapolis?
Last edited by NickB1967; 05-05-2014 at 10:50 AM..
This subject was touched in the book Freakonomics, very compelling documentary
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Can you force a doctor or provider to perform or fund abortions when s/he or it does not want to do that?
