"Legalized Abortion and Crime": Eugenics with a Happy Face.

Editor's note. The following is adapted from the August 1999 edition of Life Insight, a publication of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.

Princeton University is not the only ivory tower harboring academics with headline potential. The appointment of Peter ("Death to Disabled Newborns!") Singer to the bioethics faculty should continue to generate controversy until Princeton relents. [See also, p. 3]

Recently, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford University Law School professor John Donohue III created a furor with their research paper "Legalized Abortion and Crime."

Levitt and Donohue brazenly attempt to put a happy face on the achingly personal and national tragedy that is abortion by contending that legalized abortion, unleashed by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, fueled the drop in crime, particularly murder, in the 1990s. How?

Because a new subclass of humanity they've identified as women most at risk to have children who would engage in criminal activity have higher abortion rates, thus preemptively executing the would-be felons. This subclass, we are told, is populated predominantly by women who are teens, single, and/or African American.

Talk about your prenatal racial profiling! The American public is supposed to be grateful to Harry Blackmun for having been spared the cost of not only the crimes, but due process, trial by jury, incarceration, appeals, and execution.

The authors include all manner of caveats on the "well recognized potential shortcomings of the [crime] data" and concede the general impossibility of ever proving the asserted causal link with any degree of certainty. The paper footnotes even the title with "preliminary and incomplete."

Not surprisingly, however, articles extolling the findings are popping up throughout the proabortion press. The thesis has also been given wide and largely uncritical play in news stories. Yet there have been a number of indignant editorials and op-ed pieces questioning the authors' eugenicist leanings. Among the critics are those who ordinarily uncritically parrot the proabortion line but who are deeply offended by the racist implications of Levitt and Donohue's argument.

With its dispassionate academic tone and its profoundly wrong-headed thesis, "Legalized Abortion and Crime" brings to mind Jonathan Swift's satirical essay "A Modest Proposal." The two papers have so much in common that I'm half expecting an announcement from Messrs. Levitt and Donohue that the whole thing was just a zany joke.

Swift's "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country ..." proposed to pay mothers for breeding and nursing their children. Poor mothers with many children would not then be forced to spend their days begging and could undertake some gainful employment. And infants would be sold at 12 months, after weaning, as a tasty delicacy for the gentry.

The commonwealth would then be rid of children who might "turn thieves for want of work." Swift minutely calculates the monetary benefits to the nation, just as Donohue and Levitt tote up' the ever so speculative savings from executing likely criminals in utero.

Unfortunately, it appears that many people are accepting Levitt and Donohue's hypothesis as Revealed Truth (no matter that the paper is as yet unpublished and not peer reviewed). A few random observations about their methodology and assumptions may illuminate the paths which led them to error. [See also the editorial on page two.]

First, the authors insist that their study is not about abortion but "unwantedness."

The authors rely on studies conducted in eastern Europe and Scandinavia of children born to mothers who were denied an abortion by the state at a time when abortions were restricted. In overwhelming numbers, the mothers chose to raise these children rather than making an adoption plan. Researcher P.K. Dagg claims that these "unwanted children" were substantially more likely to be involved in crime and have poorer .life prospects, even when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the mother.

But "wantedness" is such a slippery concept. How many unplanned babies are treasured once the obstacles presented by the pregnancy are overcome and certainly once the baby is seen and held? Indeed, American adoption law reflects this truth: a mother cannot relinquish her parental rights to an adoptive couple until after the baby's birth.

Conversely, researchers have known since before Roe that child abuse is most common in families where children were very much "wanted" -- but wanted in the wrong way by insecure parents with unrealistic expectations.

Second, for all their insistence that this is not about abortion but "unwantedness," the reason Levitt and Donohue's unpublished argument went over so well is that it reassured people that, thanks to Roe, there are fewer of "those" people. How ironic, then, that they readily acknowledge that "legalizing abortion leads to an increase in the conception rate among women who do not want babies...."

One recent study they cite found that the decline in birth rates due to legalized abortion to be only 5-10%. In other words, due to the availability of abortion, more women take the risk of being sexually active because they have the insurance of abortion to protect them from the risk of bearing an "unwanted" child.

Levitt and Donohue's paper is free of any appreciation of the depth and complexities of the human heart. Theirs is a mechanistic view of human behavior and relations. One passage will suffice:

We denote the net utility impact that the birth of a baby has on a mother as B.... If B is negative (e.g., due to limitations the baby places on either work or leisure activities, monetary cost or opportunity costs of nurturing existing children, or discontent with the father or concerns about future difficulty in attracting a marriage partner) then the woman is better off without a baby at that time. In cases where B [is less than] 0, we will term the baby "unwanted."

Really captures the struggle in every woman's heart, doesn't it?

Consider, finally, the unspoken assumption inherent in this paper -- that human behavior is largely, if not exclusively, predetermined at birth by one's mother's status.

True, children born to poor single mothers may have a tougher time achieving social, educational, and career heights than privileged children from a two-parent home. But many do succeed, because someone took the time to instill in them values like self-control, respect for self and others, and persistence in education and work.

Might I suggest another avenue of research? Let's determine what conditions lead families to produce academics who have no sense of the sanctity and dignity of human life. Some early childhood intervention in values education might really pay off.