“The problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.”
—G. K. CHESTERTON
Could it be that abortion produces important social benefits? Could it be that making abortion illegal would cause destructive social pathologies? Precisely such an argument has been made in favor of abortion. It was made by two scholars, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Stanford University, in a paper that made quite a splash when it was published in 2001. Levitt popularized the thesis in a best-selling book that he coauthored with Stephen Dubner called Freakonomics. In fact, Levitt and Donohue’s argument is so famous that it is sometimes referred to simply as “the Freakonomics argument.”
The argument, in fact, focuses on crime. Crime rates in America were very high in the 1970s, and they declined dramatically in the 1990s. Levitt and Donohue argue that one of the reasons—not the only reason, but one of the main reasons—for this decline was abortion, which increased drastically after Roe v. Wade. Quite simply, they argued that abortion reduced the number of unwanted children in America, and these unwanted children, had they been born, were more likely to become criminals. The decline of crime, therefore, in their view, can be directly traced to the elimination of these unwanted prospective criminals from the population.
To quote Levitt and Donohue, “Abortion is an efficient way to curtail future crime. It’s a simple math problem.” Pro-abortion advocates have jumped on this argument, and they like it because it’s an argument that appeals to safety. If you want to live in a society that’s more orderly, that has less crime, one way to do that is to eliminate children whose unfortunate lives are more likely to push them in the direction of criminality. I must say that on the New York cocktail circuit this argument, among the “limousine liberals,” the classic rich Democrat, the Freakonomics argument is very popular.
Levitt and Donohue approach their argument with some caution. They do say that their argument is not a reason to become an advocate for abortion. In fact, Levitt even says that if you believe that the fetus is the moral equivalent of a person, then the trade-off of trying to get lower crime rates by killing human beings is awful. It makes no sense. Levitt even says, “You are misguided if you use our study to base your opinion about what the right policy is toward abortion.” These caveats notwithstanding, Levitt and Donohue do say that current efforts to regulate abortion such as heartbeat bills are making future crime rates more likely to go up, and so they have hung tough on their argument. To some degree it is understandable why pro-choice advocates have adopted this argument because it draws a direct connection between pro-choice laws, Roe v. Wade if you will, and the welcome decline of crime in America in the last few decades.
Since pro-abortion people, despite these caveats, embrace the idea, let’s seriously consider the argument from Freakonomics. First of all, let’s for a moment presume that the argument is completely true. Let’s presume that abortion does have the social benefits just as Levitt and Donohue suggest. All that would seem to prove is that forms of oppression, even murderous forms of oppression, can sometimes have unintended positive consequences. There’s a very interesting book written by the German historian Götz Aly called Hitler’s Beneficiaries. Aly asks the question “Why did the Germans support Hitler to the very end?” His answer in part is that they did so because Hitler was a socialist. He had an expansive welfare state that provided all kinds of social benefits to the German people: retirement benefits, income supplements, unemployment insurance, health care, and so on.
But then Aly raises the question: How did Hitler fund all that? Where did he get the money? And the answer is very simple. He got the money by looting the Jews within Germany, and he got the money by looting captive peoples in Europe outside Germany. The German people enjoyed some of the benefits of him stealing and the benefit of his murderous rampage; it made life easier for people in Germany after World War I, and that’s why the German people hung tough with Hitler. It wasn’t that they all liked Hitler as a person or they agreed with Hitler or they even knew everything he was doing, but they actually derived benefits from his stolen goods. Here we see a way in which Hitler’s terrible oppression and mass murder delivered a social benefit to the German people.326
Some argue that slavery, a terrible form of oppression, produced some economic and social benefits for the oppressors and others in the society at the time. One of its social benefits was to make dirt-poor white laborers and farmers in the South have higher self-esteem. These white laborers were at the very bottom of society, but thanks to slavery they could always say that their social status was higher than that of the slave, than that of the black man, and so slavery supplied a kind of psychological floor above which all white people were placed. However, I think no person in their right mind would condone this form of oppression on the basis that the enslaving of some produced the social benefit of raising the self-image of others.
In the case of Levitt and Donohue’s argument, even if crime rates would become lower by aborting certain groups, that does not justify aborting people in low-income neighborhoods. In fact, let’s push that thinking even further. Presumably, one could eliminate all crime produced by a particular cohort of young people by killing them all off before they were born. In other words, imagine an abortion rate of 100 percent. No children are born in that area at all. Obviously, if you then look twenty or twenty-five years later, you’ll discover that that age group hasn’t committed any crime. Why? Because they don’t exist. When pushed to the extreme, the argument is exposed. The argument that the way to get less crime is to preemptively kill off all the potential people who could do those crimes is not an argument that holds up.
This notion that there are people in the world who are in some way predisposed to become criminals has its roots in a very real and sick ideology: eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that the quality of a population—be it the race, gender, intellectual, or moral quality—can be improved by selecting or getting rid of people who will pollute the community. These people will bring down the average national IQ, commit crimes, look ugly, and pull the country downward in some way. The eugenics argument was actually cited by Justice Clarence Thomas in May 2019 when the Supreme Court turned down an abortion-related appeal in Indiana. Referencing eugenics, Thomas specifically cited Freakonomics and linked its argument to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who was a dedicated champion of eugenics and well-known racist.327
I want to zoom into Levitt and Donohue’s argument more closely to see whether the correlation it establishes between legal abortion and reduced crime rates actually holds up because this is the crux of their argument. While I clearly dispute the morality of eugenics, of killing people in certain groups for some perceived social benefit, it is clear that their argument isn’t supported by real evidence.
In some places, specifically New York City, their argument appears to hold up—until you look more closely. There actually is a correlation in New York. Legal abortions went up, up, up in the 1970s after Roe v. Wade in 1973, and in New York crime went down, down, down in the late 1980s and 1990s. So naturally, New York is an example they might look at to support their argument. But this pattern doesn’t hold for other cities. If you look at Newark, right across from New York City, or look to Baltimore, a couple of hundred miles south of New York, we find that abortion went up in the 1970s, but crime was also up. In fact, the rate of violence in Baltimore is climbing faster than ever before. The level of violence in Baltimore is the highest it’s ever been to this day.328 And the level of violence remains high in Newark as well. So, while New York and Newark looked similar twenty-five or thirty years ago, now their crime rates are quite different. Cincinnati also hasn’t seen a sharp decline in violence. So, what this means is that it’s more likely that policies specific to New York City produced the decline of the New York crime rate and not the common thread of abortions, which had been going up through the 1970s and 1980s in all of these cities.
So, then, why did crime actually go down? It’s very easy to see why that happened, particularly in New York. Crime rates went down because mayors like Rudy Giuliani began to adopt a get-tough policy on crime. Quite simply, the authorities began to lock up the criminals, take them off the street—and this, by the way, doesn’t apply only to serious criminals, like murderers and rapists. The focus was also on petty criminals, like burglars. Studies showed that petty criminals often graduate to more serious forms of crime, and moreover they create an atmosphere in which crime becomes more acceptable and people live in fear.
This is known as “the broken windows theory. ” The idea is that if you walk into a poor neighborhood and you see a broken window and you come back a week later and that broken window is not fixed, it is very likely that in subsequent weeks more windows will be broken in that neighborhood. Why? Because the unfixed window sends the message to the community, “Nobody cares about these things. Property rights are ultimately not being protected in this neighborhood. The cops are powerless. Break-ins cannot be stopped. You can break windows with impunity”; and so it happens. There was a real crackdown on crime in the 1980s and 1990s; Americans got sick of crime. In places like New York there were very effective policies put into place. That’s the overwhelming reason why crime rates went down. Abortion had little if anything to do with it.
I think the authors of Freakonomics have preposterously exaggerated the risk of a child becoming a criminal. Let’s consider a poor woman in a poor area of the country who is pregnant. She decides to carry the baby to term and not get an abortion, and let’s say this is in 1974, right after Roe v. Wade passed and before crime was cleaned up wherever she lives. First of all, the woman has a fifty-fifty chance of having a girl or a boy. If she has a girl, what’s the chance that that girl is going to become a violent criminal? Statistically, very low. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by males. Right away we eliminate 50 percent of the chance that we’re going to have a violent criminal on our hands.
The second issue is, if the woman has the baby, she has two choices. She can keep the baby and raise it in her neighborhood, which is perhaps a dysfunctional environment, or she can give the child up for adoption. If the child is given up for adoption, suddenly the unwanted child becomes a wanted child. It might not have been wanted by her, but it’s wanted by another couple who decides to raise it. What is the chance that this adoptive child placed in a wanted home will now become a criminal? Much lower. In fact, it is Levitt and Donohue’s own argument that “unwantedness” is a decisive factor that leads to criminality. The point here is that Levitt and Donohue have grossly exaggerated the chances that unwanted children born post-Roe in cities will become violent criminals.
In closing this argument, there’s something particularly strange and repulsive about killing people before they have done anything wrong. Should someone be killed based solely on the idea that he or she might do something wrong? At the end of the day, that’s what the Levitt and Donohue argument comes to.
To assume that someone will become a criminal, to assume that they are nothing more than a statistic, sets them up for failure. There are so many rich Democrats who think like this, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy for others because this ideology seeps into the culture. So many people in inner cities have a sense of despair and hopelessness because their Democrat leaders, who have been their leaders for decades, don’t think enough of them to actually create any opportunities. Instead, they want them to remain dependent on the government. Many Democrats don’t think it’s worth it to change the inner-city environments in which people grow up. They just want to put a bandage on the problem—often in the form of handouts from the government.
Anyone may become a criminal, but there are so many success stories. When you kill off a population of people, you lose all the bad things that they might do, but you also lose all the good things that they might do. There might be an Einstein in the group. There might be a Picasso. There might be people who don’t achieve extraordinary things but still live decent, lawful, meaningful lives. Those lives are lost because we kill off those people ; we as a society decide it’s okay to kill off those people on the chance that some of them might go down the wrong road. Who is one of the most intelligent minds you can think of? What is one of the items you probably can’t live without? Steve Jobs, inventor of the iPhone, could have been aborted.
Steve Jobs’s mother could have chosen to get an illegal abortion but instead chose to give him up for adoption. She was Catholic, so adoption was encouraged, and she went to a shelter for unwed mothers that delivered babies and found homes for them. Steve Jobs said in an interview, “I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and went through a lot to have me.” 329
If Steve Jobs was one in a million, and sixty-one million babies have been aborted in America since Roe v. Wade, what does that mean for our country? It means that we are missing out on geniuses like him, and we will never know the amazing things those people could have accomplished. Even if we account for some of them not being productive members of society or just being consumers and takers rather than contributing, the benefits of the minds of a few like Jobs would have provided immense benefits to millions of people. President Trump said, “We cannot know what our citizens yet unborn will achieve, the dreams they will imagine.”330 This is true. If they are not born and are killed in the womb, we will never know.
Is it bad to be born in an environment riddled with crime, violence, gangs, drugs, broken homes? Of course. It’s terrible. We need to improve the educational opportunities of children who grow up in difficult neighborhoods. We need to be tough on crime so families are safe. It’s not just poverty but the lack of a father figure that leads many young males to join gangs, seeking a community and family there. What underpins any society is the family. In order to restore the family structure in America, as well as in inner-city neighborhoods, we must begin by stopping abortion. Abortion may seem like a “quick fix ” but only results in spreading despair and a culture of death in that community. Abortion devalues human life. Fostering a culture of cherishing human life is the first step in stopping the vicious cycle of violence in communities.