“Declining crime rates could result from… selective abortion on the part of women most at risk to have children who would engage in criminal activity…” – Steven Levitt
At first glance this may sound like a sick joke, but what looks like bad humor is actually somebody’s idea of serious work. Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, posits that crime rates went down in the 90s because more women killed their babies in utero after child killing was “legalized” in the 70s. He writes:
Greater numbers of abortions are likely to reduce the size of a cohort, which can have a straightforward, but ultimately temporary, effect on overall crimes rates: if abortion decreases the number of births in a cohort, when that cohort reaches the late teens and twenties, there will be fewer young males, and thus more crime.
Of course, the racial (and eugenics) implications of Levitt’s theory are enormous. Since black women are three times more likely to kill their babies and blacks, on average, commit more crimes, following Levitt’s logic, declining crime rates are attributed more to the deaths of black babies. I don’t think the pro-aborts want to latch on to this one.
I did a search on Levitt’s 1999 article and found it at EconPapers. Click here for a PDF copy of “Legalized Abortion and Crime.”
I don’t know if Levitt thought about the implications when he decided to publish his ideas, but Steve Sailer, who often writes about race, sure has. In Pre-emptive Executions?, Sailer eviscerates Levitt’s flawed findings and offers a much more rational explanation for crime reduction. Although some dismiss Sailer as a racist, at least he understands that Levitt’s strange and racially-loaded ideas are “morally repugnant.” He writes:
Although Levitt desperately wants to avoid talking about race in relation to abortion and crime, blacks make an ideal test case for his theory because, as Levitt himself has noted, black women have about triple the number of abortions per capita as white women. So Levitt’s theory suggests that black teens should have “benefited†more than whites from abortion. Instead, black 14- to 17-year-olds were an apocalyptic 4.4 times more murderous in 1993 than a decade earlier. The black-white teen murder ratio grew from five times worse in 1983 to 11 times worse in 1993, according to the FBI.The embarrassing truth, as Levitt admitted to me when I debated him on Slate.com in 1999, is that when he dreamed up his theory with John J. Donohue, he looked at crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and paid little attention to the vast crack epidemic that laid waste to urban America in between.
Sailer’s analysis of crime rates sounds “right,” more intuitive. Levitt, by his own admission, sought a “novel” explanation for falling crime rates, one that doesn’t ring true. Think about the logical leap you’d have to make to conclude that crime has decreased because of something akin to retroactive capital punishment. The fact that more criminals are locked up is the most likely reason crime rates fall, not that there are fewer criminals alive!
Another plausible argument is that legalized child killing has increased crime. That sounds right. Sailer writes:
The liberal politics and permissive social attitudes that made legal abortion popular in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. (where it was de facto legal before Roe) likely also contributed to the crack epidemic. D.C., for example, enjoyed both the highest abortion rate in the U.S. and, in later years, a popular mayor, Marion Barry, who was himself a crackhead.
The last line was unexpected but sadly true, and it illustrates the absurdity of abandoning standards of decency and the havoc it wreaks on society.
Update: I think this is an online debate on Slate.com between Steve Sailer and Steven Levitt. It looks like Part I, II and III of “Does Abortion Prevent Crime?”
Related: The Roe Effect and Babies Having Fewer Babies.
Readers respond to this Opinion Journal article.
Update II (4/21): Steve Levitt responds:
I think it is only fair to an author that if you are going to criticize a theory, you first invest the time to read what the author has written. Everything on this blog is a response to someone’s criticism of my work, not the work itself. It completely misses the point. My research is not an endorsement of abortion, baby killing, eugenics, etc. It is not a pleasant theory, but the data overwhelmingly support it. And it makes sense. As some of the people posting say, if you kill everyone there will be no crime. Essentially that is my point. I’m not saying it is good or bad, I am just saying that if you abort 1 million fetuses a year, it should be no surprise crime is lower when that generation reaches its peak crime years. That is not an endorsement, it is a fact.LaShawn, if you are interested, I will send you a copy of the book and/or the academic article. I am confident that after you read it you will have a different opinion. If you are serious about the truth, give me a chance.
My response:
Thanks for stopping by, Steve. I would like to read your book. I’ll send you an e-mail with my contact information.I read some of your report but not all of it. I will read the rest. Time will tell if I change my view of your premise. And I hope you noticed that I didn’t accuse you of endorsing abortion. In fact, the post title simply restates your conclusion, and the post itself is about the racial implications of your conclusion and Sailer’s analysis of your theory.
I linked to the PDF copy of your report and responses to Steve Sailer so my readers would have the relevant information and form their own opinions. I will give your book a fair reading and post a review on the blog.