Posted on 05/13/2005 10:29:49 AM PDT by voletti
Towards the end of that decade, confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate fell by more than 50% in the space of five years; by 2000, the book notes, the overall murder rate was at its lowest for 35 years. Other kinds of crime fell too. Why? Some gave the credit to economic growth; others to gun control; still others to new methods of policing, or to greater reliance on imprisonment, or to increasing use of the death penalty, or to the ageing of the population.
Mr Levitt goes carefully through these various explanations, checking them against the evidence. He finds that some of them do offer a partial explanation (more jail time, for instance), whereas others do not (greater use of the death penalty, new policing methods). But the most intriguing finding was that one of the most powerful explanations had not even been broached. That explanation was abortion.
In January 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout the United States, where previously it had been available in only five states. In 1974, roughly 750,000 women had abortions in America; by 1980, the number was 1.6m (one abortion for every 2.3 live births). “What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v Wade?” the book asks. “Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three...In other words, 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...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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Only from the left, commit a crime (murder) to prevent a crime.
I we kill all the poor people - we'll greatly reduce the number of welfare recipiants.
well lemme see this perfect logic...
the rooster goes atop the barn roof every morning and crows. then the sun comes up. yep. has to be. the rooster crowing causes the sun to come up.
Hitler's laughing from the grave. These abortion cheerleaders are so caught up in trying to "sell" the public, that they just don't seem to grasp what they're actually saying. This goes straight back to the old "progressive" sterilization and racial hygiene policies of Margaret Sanger. Racist as hell, and anti-poor. Keep playing this one up, leftist fools. You're exposing yourselves for what you really are.
Herod would love this. Let's murder all the unborn children of pregnant, impoverished teens, and think how much lower the crime rate will be...
Society and its Godless, horrific, murderous "law" in favor of abortion is killing far more innocents than the teens do.
Abortion is probably more directly linked to the rise in illegal alien work in this country. We've killed of an entire generation of American children who otherwise would be in a position to take many of those jobs...if they were taught to work.
If abortion works so well, why don't we just bomb the areas where most women who have abortions come from?
Great justification: we're killing potential criminals. I thought you had to a) actually do something illegal to be considered a criminal, and that once you did, b) you were innocent until proven guilty.
Anyway, an interesting statistic in this debate is not being aired:
According to the Census Bureau (2000), African-Americans will cease to exist as a minority of any note by 2075. Major reason: 1 in 3 black children are aborted (the majority of the other two are liable to be incarcerated, grow up in a one-parent home with concomitant issues, or die younger). Perhaps if the DNC were to find out that their voting base would cease to exist, they might change their tune.
Those citing lower crime numbers in relation to the number of abortions would have been right at home in Nazi Germany.
As the daughter of a teenage mother, had my sister at 15, me at 16, I thank God she didn't abort us. I thank God I had great-grandparents who helped raise me and instill Christian beliefs. Abortion had just become legal but in my family it was never an option. The family stepped in and help pick up the pieces. Times weren't always easy but I am thankful for my life.
From me to the Economist:
Hey you baby-killing pro-abort bunch of lefties, the crime wave kicked off in the late 60s and 70s because of the pinko-commie hippies who were doing all the drugs they could get their hands on. I'm not completely sure about it, but I strongly suspect that it was a KGB plot.
So stop with the pro-abort gun-grabbing "crime studies". If you want to analyze post abortion-holocaust crime rates, take compare the 1950s to any decade since Woodstock. Pin heads!!!
So, the left is against the death penalty for people who have already committed murder, but they are hell bent for abortion of those who MIGHT commit a crime because they would be born into poverty.
Orwell would be so proud.
Most of these pregnancies are among those who should not be getting pregnant in the first place- unwed, poor teenagers. So if abortion was banned and these girls became sexually responsible (no sex before marriage, getting an education, etc) most of those babies would not exist anyway.
This was one of the arguments used by eugenics supporters back in the early 20th century. Their legacy includes the Nazi ovens. The slippery slope has already been demonstrated.
And if you kill ALL those nasty little embryos and fetuses before they're born, in 13 years the rate of teen pregnancy, teen crime, teen complexion problems, etc. starts its inexorable and dramatic downward plunge...
But wait! We can start the downward plunge even sooner by changing, I mean, updating the definition a little. If the Mighty and Immortal and All-Supreme Court would just change the definition of "birth" to mean "able to do algebra," then most of our pre-teens are also pre-born, and we could execute, um, I mean terminate them all. And then, no problems!
(signed)
B.L.("Baal")Zebub
True enough. but if you removed the abortion option altogether, then the incentive to be more responsible is that much greater.
I don't care where the kids come from, I do care that we have become such a crass and callous civilization that we leave the possibility of murder open as a last resort, when a little intelligence and dilligence up front would have been more in order.
You can just as easily say that aboriton is linked to the national debt or the problems with social security.
I agree- girls in the inner city would be forced to become more responsible without abortion as a safety net.
The result of this is there are fewer democrats over time. Felons and career criminals are overwhelmingly the product of parent(s) who are democrats. These very same enemies of society are themselves overwhelmingly democrat voters. (It is for this reason that democrat politicans want felons to vote and work as campaign aides).
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