"Negative Eugenics" ... A Look on the Bright Side of Roe v. Wade

The Human Life Review ^ | Summer, 2002 | David P. Mortimer

[Askel5]

The Posthumous Application of Negative Eugenics

David P. Mortimer
The Human Life Review | Summer, 2002

Halting and punishing crime in advance is risky, as John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) learned in the Spielberg thriller Minority Report. Anderton, Chief of Washington, D.C.’s Pre-Crime Department in the year 2054, stops violent crimes before they are committed. With the aid of three pre-cognitive human beings networked and floating in nutrient liquid, a crime can be predicted, and a perpetrator identified with the aid of holographic computer imaging. The proto-offender is arrested and sentenced for the crime he or she never committed.

The Department is effective: there hasn’t been a murder in Washington, D.C. for six years, and its election year slogan is, That which keeps us safe also keeps us free. In this utopian world, citizens willingly trade their freedoms for guaranteed security. There are some skeptics, but Pre-Crime is viewed by most as a necessary evil. Although a few would-be perpetrators may suffer injustice, the whole city feels safe.

At first, Anderton is blind to the immorality of the precognitive technology he uses. Only after being accused of a pre-crime himself, and avoiding capture and retina scans by having his eyes illegally replaced, does he begin to see its great evil.

In our own day, crime rates have steadily plummeted for nine straight years, and risen only a few percentage points in the past two years. [1] Of the many possibilities to explain the dramatic decline, there is one startling theory that suggests criminals were eliminated before they had the chance to commit their crimes. It could easily be termed a "Pre-Crime theory," but without the "pre-cogs," holographic technology, and police arrests.

In May 2001, researchers John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt came to the provocative conclusion that "[l]egalizing abortion in the early 1970s eliminated many of the potential criminals of the 1990s." [2] Their study, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," was published in Harvard’s prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics and its conclusion rests upon the premise that abortion is a remedy to the problem of unwanted children.

According to the study’s authors, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalizing abortion may be saving "on the order of $30 billion annually." [3] These academics are speaking America’s love language: taxpayer savings and greater safety for all. And Roe’s "rebate check" does not even begin to reflect the billions in savings to the welfare system of not having to provide prenatal and postnatal care to mothers and children in poverty.

With detailed statistics and tables, Donahue and Levitt correlate the sheer number of American abortions with the dramatic drop in crime some eighteen years after Roe v. Wade. Referred to as a "pariah theory" in a New York Times headline, the study argues that the disproportionate abortion rates among teenagers, unmarried women, and African-Americans are directly linked to a tremendous drop in crime. [4] These women, they argue, are more at risk of having children—pariahs—who would grow up to engage in criminal activity. With legalized abortion eliminating these bad apples, fewer criminals are around twenty years later to steal BMWs, slash their tires, or sell crack to their owners. [5]

The theory is based on a kind of statistical racial profiling: children born to disadvantaged women have "poor life prospects," tend to spend their childhood in poverty, and are "resented" and "unwanted." The authors cite studies that indicate many of these children grow up unloved and fatherless, and tend not to be held, breastfed, rocked or nurtured by their mothers. These factors place a young child at risk to become a habitual criminal or violent crime offender. In short: poor minority families are the seedbed of criminality.

Yet, Donohue and Levitt attempt to sidestep the issue of race by arguing that the most significant risk factor for criminal behavior is being "unwanted." [6] With a formulaic B<0 to indicate an unwanted baby, they argue it was the disproportionate elimination of unwantedfetuses that caused the unexpected windfall in reduced crime. [7] The researchers have thus appropriated and recast the "every child a wanted child" slogan first used by eugenicist and birth control crusader Margaret Sanger (and fifty years later by abortion proponents). [8]

The most disturbing part of the Donohue-Levitt study is their contrast between states with the lowest and the states with the highest abortion rates. Some states may have missed out on the unforeseen benefit of reduced crime because their abortion rates were the lowest: murders in these states increased by 16.9%. States with the highestabortion rates, however, saw murder rates plummet by 31.5%. [9] The data suggests that no matter what other poverty programs are in place to assist the poor and reduce crime, the sheer number of abortions dwarfs all other factors.

Unwitting Eugenics

This is the familiar methodology of eugenics: In the interest of all, the elimination or prevention of genetic burdens and threats to society will reap considerable cost savings. Technically, this is known as "negative eugenics," in contrast to "positive eugenics" which seeks to match together those with well-endowed heredity. [10] In the eugenics of the 1920s and 1930s, many social problems were thought to be largely due to poor heredity. By contrast, the eugenics of today has largely abandoned the old nature/nurture debate, and cares little if societal burdens are due to heredity or environment. Because these human beings will self-perpetuate—due to ill heredity or environment (it matters not to social engineers)—their eugenic elimination or prevention is a necessary evil for the greater good of society.

Eugenics, from the Greek for "well born" (or "good heredity"), advances a hierarchy of human lives. A term coined by Francis Galton in 1883, eugenics began as a movement to create a superior form of humanity by creating the conditions that would encourage the reproduction of the "fit" while discouraging the "unfit." [11] Galton, in his book Hereditary Genius, argued that human beings should take control of their own evolution using breeding techniques known to science. The eugenics movement "spread rapidly in the early years of the twentieth century among the cultural elite and the intelligentsia. . . ." [12]

It was a blend of popular nineteenth century biological science and philosophy, and it appropriated the power of the state to achieve its end of improving the genetic shape of the populace. It was a powerful social movement before being momentarily discredited by the Nazis and totalitarianism. Regaining popular and academic support in recent decades with the rise of new medical technologies, its hierarchical and selective ideology has been permitted to return with new force and legitimacy.

Eugenics is utilitarian and rejects the concept of equal human moral worth. It always creates a class of outsiders, burdens—even enemies—of the body politic. On the top are those lives of greater value—lives worth expending resources upon—and on the bottom are those deemed unwanted, worthless, emotionally burdensome or costly. In eugenic criminology, those on the top should be protected from crime and undue financial burden, while those on the bottom tend to be perpetrators and costly ballast. (Perhaps recent corporate crimes involving Enron and WorldCom will help correct this thinking.)

It may not be known for years whether or not the Harvard "pariah theory’s" methodology is valid. [13] But if Donohue and Levitt are correct, America has unwittingly embarked upon a government-sanctioned eugenics project that dwarfs any ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe. The missing cohort since January 1973 is now 40 million. By dusting off the old eugenic model of reducing crime and poverty by eliminating would-be criminals and the impoverished, these academics have brought statistical support to the legal holding of Roe v. Wade.

Ominously, the "pariah theory" has all the benefits that once evaded the pseudoscientific and racist eugenics movement. In Europe and America, the power of the state was used to prevent, segregate, sterilize, or eliminate those deemed "unfit." The legislature was the most expedient vehicle for its program. States enacted laws to "protect the class of socially inadequate citizens . . . from themselves" in an effort to "promote the welfare of society by mitigating race degeneracy and raising the average standard of intelligence . . ." [14]

Not only crime, but pauperism, feeblemindedness, insanity, idiocy, imbecility, and epilepsy were thought to be hereditary. Such institutionalized people were, in the words of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, "by the propagation of their kind a menace to society." [15] By the mid 1930s, over half of the states had eugenic sterilization laws on their books, and over 20,000 legal sterilizations had been performed. [16]

By contrast, contemporary eugenics uses the power of the state, but is uncoercive. It has adapted itself to embrace some of the ideals of a free society and has enveloped itself in a legal theory of rights, choice, freedom, and privacy. [17] Rather than being legislated, its agenda is permitted by the rule of law (i.e. the expansion of rights). The primary branch of government to expand its agenda is no longer the legislature (as it was with the eugenics of nearly a century ago), but the judiciary. Its greatest cultural artifact in law is the "mystery passage" in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992):

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Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing . . . These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. [18]

---

The unencumbered autonomous self defines his/her own reality. In so doing, the traditional relationships between mother and offspring, parent and parent, and parents and offspring (as well as family) are redefined.

Judge Robert Bork commented that this "fog-bound rhetoric" describes a "mood of radical individualism," and it is no wonder why the struggle for control of judgeships has become savage and political. [19] When coupled with the program of eugenics, the state is able to accomplish selective population control (perhaps weeding out criminals or the unemployable) through free choice and incentives. The strategy is simply to legalize and subsidize.

While there is little fear that we will soon return to the legislative coercion of the old eugenics, there is a far greater worry: the eugenic hierarchy of human lives together with the mood of radical individualism will increase pressure on the judiciary to continue its expansion of individual rights. Penumbras and emanations will benefit those who are fortunate to be well-placed on the hierarchy, but those who are victims of poor heredity or unfortunate environment will be left out (losers include the medically dependent, the aged, and the handicapped newborn). Eugenics has a history of demonizing the poor and exaggerating their pathology.

An astonishing example of this eugenic reasoning is found in 1927. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell upholding the coercive sterilization of Carrie Buck, a ward of the state who was determined to be "feeble minded." (the vote was 8 to 1):

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It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

---

Holmes reasoned that if the government can ask its "best" people to give up their lives for their country in war, it could ask those "least fit" to lay down their procreative powers for the greater benefit of society.

This popular eugenic sentiment was shared a few years earlier by Margaret Sanger in a chapter entitled "The Cruelty of Charity" in her book, The Pivot of Civilization.

---

Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly . . . Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded: many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be borne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born. [20]

---

Sanger bristled at the charity provided by churches for the poor, considering such work to have a dysgenic effect upon the population by multiplying "bad stocks."

In addition to creating a hierarchy of human life, eugenics considers traditional charity to be cruel, a Malthusian argument that would see the necessity of fetid pools and the plague as a necessary check on population, or a Darwinian perspective that views nature "red in tooth and claw" as improving life for all by the elimination of the weak and unfit.

Academia and Eugenics

Ironically, it was Donohue’s Stanford University and Levitt’s University of Chicago (along with Harvard, the institution that published their peer-reviewed study), that first gave birth to the eugenics movement in the United States. [21] It began with the formation in 1906 of a blue ribbon Committee on Eugenics of the agricultural American Breeders’ Association. Members included the Chancellor of Stanford University, a University of Chicago sociologist and expert on crime, a Stanford biologist, and a Harvard geneticist. [22] The purpose of the committee was to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race" and "to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood." [23] A few years later a sub-committee on criminality was created which included Charles R. Henderson, a University of Chicago sociologist [24] The most prominent leader on the Eugenics committee was Charles B. Davenport (previously an instructor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago), who would become a central figure in the eugenics movement. A movement advocating a hierarchy of humanity, eugenic research was spearheaded by academics at these, and other, Ivy League institutions.

The inevitable conclusion of the Donohue-Levitt study is that abortion is a legal choice and a necessary evil. The true quality of the "choice" involved is never discussed (the reality is that a woman often perceives she has "no other choice," or a "choice" under pressure from a boyfriend, friend, a spouse, or parents). Yet, with these researchers’ findings, low-income women may now contemplate the elimination of their offspring as a patriotic good—a heroic self-sacrifice to benefit society’s greater safety and well-being.

The researchers attempt to avoid discussions of public policy, and in interviews Levitt maintains his work "is not proscriptive, but descriptive." [25] The lines blur, however, when the subject of the Hyde Amendment comes up. A law enacted by Congress in 1976, it prevented tax dollars from being used to fund Medicaid abortions. In Donohue and Levitt’s study the law receives restrained scrutiny. Yet, the inevitable signal to politicians is that any abortion disincentive that would discourage poor minority women from abortions would be wrongheaded, counterproductive, and excessively expensive to taxpayers decades later. The study lays the foundation for the argument which will someday be heard in state and federal legislative hearing rooms: In order to reap the maximum benefit of reduced crime, the government must not only legalize abortion, it must subsidize it.

In their first working paper, Donohue and Levitt conclude their summary with mention of the estimated $30 billion saved annually as a result of abortion. In estimating the possibility of a continued 1-2% decline in crime over the coming decades, their paper concludes with a final sentence: "To the extent that the Hyde amendment effectively restricted access to abortion [of poor women], however, this prediction might be overly optimistic." [26] In this early draft, the researchers could hardly refrain from political comment, and the message of the statistics is clear: if abortion is not subsidized for the poor by government or private means, society will pay by suffering more crime.

In the same working paper, other studies are cited that estimate the increase of "unabortions"—unwanted births due to federal bans on Medicaid abortion funding. Then Donohue and Levitt suggest that "the crime-reducing effect of legal abortion . . . may be dampened as a result of the ensuing restrictions in public funding of abortions." [27] Their final peer-reviewed study is more cautious. In their discussion of the Hyde Amendment as a factor in making abortions less affordable, they conclude indifferently that "most recent research suggests any impact [of the Hyde Amendment on births and abortions] is small." [28] Perhaps this final assessment was a safe compromise by the researcher to minimize the expected firestorm after publication, and allow others to connect the dots and draw the obvious conclusions.

Possible Applications of the "Pariah Theory"

The application of Donohue and Levitt’s findings have much to do with incentives. How might abortion be made affordable and accessible to the at-risk single minority mother? Claiming their research is apolitical, Levitt commented that in the economic worldview of their research, "people respond to incentives." [29] Although not discussed in their study, it is important to consider the "pariah theory’s" likely applications:

• additional government-subsidized Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in poor neighborhoods to ensure that crime rates continue to drop;
  
  
• more permissive abortion laws at the expense of women’s health and their right to know the risks (physical and psychological) of having an abortion;
  
  
• increased funding of Medicaid abortions (a $400 Medicaid abortion of a likely proto-criminal is a much cheaper one-time expense than the annual cost of over $20,000 to keep him in prison); and
  
  
• abortions for "high-risk" mothers in exchange for welfare benefits (some cities pay at-risk drug abusers to undergo sterilization, so why not offer abortion incentives to welfare recipients?);
  
  
• prenatal testing to identify and eliminate through incentives fetuses with a higher genetic risk for violence (such as fetuses with predictors such as the low- activity MAOA gene that may be activated by maltreatment while growing up). [30]

Sometimes the lines between incentive and coercion blur. Although these examples may sound extreme by today’s standards, a May 2001 Zogby poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans favored legislating mandatory birth control for all welfare recipients. [31] This attitude toward welfare mothers is not new in America.

In addition to these possible applications, one should expect to see more academic research following the trail blazed by Donohue and Levitt. These new and more bold studies will likely describe themselves as "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive." The will reiterate the myth that abortion is a necessary evil. Watch for:

• population studies attempting to calculate money that has been saved by eliminating (through abortion) a huge cohort from the welfare rolls
  
  
• cost-benefit-analysis studies that measure the financial cost to society when legislatures cut public funding for Medicaid abortions; and
  
  
• studies to measure the decline in mental illness and other handicaps that are detected through routine prenatal testing (these studies will also estimate cost savings to society for institutional care). [32]

Saving Compassionate Social Programs

Addressing poverty issues is a humanitarian solution to the plight of babies raised in conditions that may contribute to their later delinquency. The elimination of poverty, rather than a child, is always a more compassionate goal. Donohue and Levitt point out that they value the traditional anti-poverty solutions to address the environmental factors that seem to cause criminal behavior. However, these solutions are expensive and long-term. Their success is difficult to measure. The "pariah theory" indicates that a program of legalizing and subsidizing abortion is far more cost effective in reducing crime than any other program. If politicians begin to believe legalized abortion is responsible for the lion’s share of reduced crime, more vigilant efforts may be needed in the future to protect the budgets of more costly traditional social programs that reduce crime. The "pariah theory" puts at risk such costly programs as: adoption, parental training, early intervention programs, prenatal care, GED education, health care, daycare, TANF, CEDA, and unemployment assistance. These are examples of programs that would be expected of a developed country with a high income economy, while eugenic elimination is a policy one would expect to find in a totalitarian regime.

The problem of unwanted children is not new. Nearly 300 years ago Jonathan Swift anonymously presented a commonsense solution to the intractable problems of Irish hunger, poverty, crime, and "unwantedness." In his pamphlet A Modest Proposal, he suggested that a fourth of the younger children be fattened and sold in the market for food. Such a policy would solve the problem of unwanted children. Every child—even the illegitimate—would be a wanted child, with all the value and advantage of a prized head of livestock. Crime would plummet. Hunger and overpopulation would end. The stagnant economy would prosper. Free choice, market forces, and elimination could turn the problem into a profitable solution for the greater good. [33] His satire, of course, dramatized the need for real choices and real opportunities, rather than the tendency to treat the poor as pariahs.

The applications of Donohue and Levitt’s "pariah theory" sound like economic—or perhaps ethnic—cleansing. This has always been the trouble with using science and economics to justify euthanasia (better off dead) or eugenics (better off never born): the words "meaning," "purpose," "goodness," "importance," and "truth" are not in their lexicon. Lacking this vocabulary, neither science nor the market can be exclusive guides in public policy. Like the anonymous visionary in A Modest Proposal, their utilitarianism reduces human beings to livestock and their empiricism results in reforms like the Nuremberg Laws.

As the F.B.I. protagonist notes in the film, Minority Report, "It’s not the future if you stop it."

Growing up in difficult circumstances is an indicator—not a determiner—of criminal behavior. Eugenics deals with cohorts and populations and overlooks people. It treats some humans as weeds that threaten the garden. It promises easy results with little cost and creates a hierarchy of humanity. But like Pre-Crime, and the historical dustbin of all social control, utopia (from its Greek derivative) is "a place that is no place.” [34]

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NOTES

1.      Christopher Newton, "FBI report shows rise in major crime," Chicago Sun-Times, June 24, 2002, p. 25.
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2.      John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," The Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 2001), Vol. 116, Issue 2: 379-420. Donahue and Levitt’s study can be found at http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/qjec_116_02_379_0.pdf
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3.     Donahue and Levitt, 414.
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4.     Alexander Stille, "Abortion Affects Crime Rates? Pariah Theory Now Considered," New York Times, April 17, 2001.
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5.     Newspapers seemed to find it difficult to find an appropriate headline without sounding crass. The San Francisco Chronicle’s headline was "Crime-stopper," (June 17, 2001, p. D1). Columnists had a field day, with Norah Vincent’s Village Voice column titled "Fewer Fetuses, Fewer Felonies?" (June 12, 2001) or Kathryn Jean Lopez’s National Review Online article "The Other Death Penalty" (June 19, 2001).
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6.     A newspaper teaser on their early research summarized: "Unwanted children are key." Karen Brandon, "Abortion, reduced crime linked," Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1999 p. 12 (the story ran on page one).
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7.     John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," Working Paper No. 1 (6/24/99), p. 14. The study’s research argues that other factors that reduce crime have a minimal impact (although other researchers suggest the study overstates the impact of abortion and downplays factors such as a booming economy, rising incarceration rates, better policing, gun control, the end of the crack epidemic, the deterrence of tougher sentences, and greater use of alarms and guards).
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8.     In Roe, Justice Blackmun acknowledged "unwantedness" as a significant factor in a crisis pregnancy: "There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it." Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 153 (1973).
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9.     Before Donohue and Levitt’s final peer-reviewed study was even finished, this trend was graphically represented from their working paper in a side bar to a short article by Stacy Perman, "The Unforseen Effect of Abortion," Time, August 23, 1999, p. 47. It further shows that states with the lowest abortion rate had an increase of violent crime of 32.2% and an increase in property crime by 12.5%. In states with the highest abortion rate, violent crime dropped 1.7% and property crime dropped 24.3%.
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10.     In the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, eugenic science was applied in two ways: through "positive eugenics," a program of encouraging marriages between "fit" couples to produce "fitter families" with many children. While "positive eugenics" used persuasion, "negative eugenics" used coercion and was based upon the assumption that the geneticallyinferior were a threat to the state and therefore the state had to act in order to protect society as a whole.
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11.     For online primary documents and introductory essays, see the Dolan DNA Learning Center’s "Eugenics Archive" funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org
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12.     Wesley Smith, Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 35.
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13.     The hypothesis that there is a correlation between being unwanted and growing up to have criminalistic tendencies is historically untrue. Presumably there were fewer "wanted" children born during the Great Depression, yet there was no correlative a blight of crime in the 1950s.
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14.     The Virginia Sterilization Act, ¶394 (1924). This statute, passed by the legislature in March 1924, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 201 (1927).
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15.     The Virginia Sterilization Act, ¶394 (1924).
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16.     Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 91.
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17.      Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965) invalidated a state statute criminalizing the use of contraceptives with a constitutional "right of privacy" found in the penumbra of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. This right of privacy was later expanded in Roe v. Wade when the Court invalidated state statutes criminalizing abortion.
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18.     Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 851 (1992) (internal citations omitted).
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19.     Robert H. Bork, "Adversary Jurisprudence," The New Criterion, May 2002, 14.
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20.     Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentanos, 1922), p. 279.
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21.     According to Haller, it was the first to organize using the name "eugenics."
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22.     David Starr Jordan, Chancellor of Stanford University, was the Committee’s chairman. Members also included Charles R. Henderson, a University of Chicago sociologist and expert on crime, Vernon L. Kellogg, a Stanford biologist, and William E. Castle, a Harvard geneticist.
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23.     Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984), p. 62-3. Haller quotes from the ABA’s Proceedings, II (1906).
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24.     Haller, 65.
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25.     Marguerite Holloway, "The Aborted Crime Wave?," Scientific American (December 1999), Vol. 281, Issue 6.
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26.     John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," Working Paper No. 1 (6/24/99), p. 36 (emphasis added).
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27.     Ibid., p. 9. (emphasis added). In a footnote, the researchers suggest that when Congress ended Medicaid coverage of abortion for the District of Columbia in the period 1988-1993, one might predict "that crime would jump in D.C. in the years from 2006-2011."
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28.     Donohue and Levitt, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, p. 385, note 7.
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29.     Sasha Abramsky, "Did Roe v. Wade abort crime?," American Prospect, No. 1 (January 1-15, 2001), p. 26.
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30.     Ronald Kotulak, "Genetic link to cycle of violence identified: Study adds fuel to debate about behavior genetics," Chicago Tribune August 2, 2002, p. 1. This news item reports on the findings by two University of Wisconsin researchers in behavioral genetics, on the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). The findings were reported in the journal Science.
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31.     Zogby Poll released May 10, 2001 [www.zogby.com/news]. (Last accessed 5/23/01). "Majority would support birth control mandates for welfare recipients, new Zogby America survey finds." Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes covered the poll on May 14, 2001 with guests Ann Coulter and Star Parker.
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32.     It is interesting to note that prominent Canadian abortion doctor Henry Morgentaler cited the Donohue-Levitt study as validation of his beliefs of thirty years ago when he predicted crime and mental illness would decline. See Henry Morgentaler, "Abortion Has Led to a Decrease in Crime," Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints, Mary E. Williams, ed. (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2002), p. 153. This is a reprint of Morgentaler’s "Abortion and Violence," The Humanist, March/April 1999.
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33.      Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick (1729).
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34.     Thomas More, Utopia (1516).
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[Askel5]

A good article from a fellow consummate researcher.

[Consort]

Voluntay Human Extinction Movement.

[Podkayne]

This is an interesting article and leads to an interesting conclusion. If voluntary eugenic abortions are leading indicators of overall crime rates and societal stability then it can be inferred that humanity - of all races - is not inherently "good". A large number of people are born with bad genes, grow up in poor environments and create problems for themselves and others.

Only through forgiveness, and the personal effort to make restitution for one's mistakes and sins can humanity forge an existance.

Supposed humam Self-extinction by removing all undesireables by sterilization or abortion will not happen. Populations which practice selective eliminations (Christianity) will dwindle and those who don't (islamic) will inherit the earth.

Why do white liberals continue to scare everyone with their "isms" - marxism, comunism, nazism, and now population control/selective breeing ism.

[Dajjal]

45 million bump

[John O]

(I'll admit up front that I didn't read the entire article)

If the article is correct, that killing poor babies decreases crime, then how can we escape the next logical step.

Killing all the poor will eliminate crime.

Of course, it's a pity that blacks make up most of the poor but surely they won't mind laying down their lives for the sake of society.

It's not racist. It's patriotic!

< /sarcasm >

[lds23]

When humans decide "who will live and who will die", I'm very afraid for humankind.

[Dasaji]

Of course, it's a pity that blacks make up most of the poor but surely they won't mind laying down their lives for the sake of society.
___________________

I used to work in the projects, and have recently met one of the directors of City Housing...then and now, there are more white girls than black "benefitting" (tongue in cheek) from these programs. (Welfare, med cards, Section 8, etc.)

I wasn't sure where your "sarcasm off" tag was inserted :)

[pollwatcher]

You're right. "Homelessness" was ginned up by the media to embarass Reagan. But there were, indeed, MORE bums on the street in the 80's. There were there because of the likes of ACLU, Donahue, and other do-gooders who ended involuntary instutionalization of alcoholics, addicts, schizophrenics and everyone else who are determined to slowly destroy themselves in public.

[pollwatcher]

Sorry - this was the wrong topic for my above reply! I've been away from FR too long!

what I meant to say is that liberals have BOTH ends covered. As evidenced in Mass., where a number of welfare moms were getting fertility treatments, courtesy of the Kennedy-loving taxpayers, of course.

[Prolix]

Note: The homicide rate is still trending quite high as depicted in this U.S. Bureau of the Census table. Especially considering that emergency medicine has improved greatly in recent decades. That is, the murder rate would be yet higher without highly skilled EMTs and ER doctors.

[Onelifetogive]

I think than an additional interesting not on the effects of the 1.5 million abortions per year or so starting 30 years ago is a Republican White House, Senate and House. The Democrats eliminated millions of voters who would have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. The national balance is very close to 50-50. Those millions would have easily tipped the scales in their favor.

[Carthago delenda est]

Pretty interesting...