Eugenicists disproved.

Having long since lost the intellectual debate on legalized abortion-- simply because abortion advocates have never been able to answer satisfactorily the question: "If the child growing in the womb is not a human being, then what is it?"--such advocates increasingly argue from eugenics. But they are not very comfortable about doing so. And with good reason.

We hear today the pragmatic argument: abortion reduces crime.

This argument has recently received academic support from a pair ofsocial scientists writing in the May, 2001, Harvard Journal of Economics. Their study "Legalized Abortion and Crime" purports to demonstrate that five American states that legalized abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) had greater decreases in crime rate than other states. The authors go on to contend that as much as half of the recent drop in crime may be attributable to legalized abortion. In Canada, Dr. Henry Morgentaler has made similar assertions.

Some pro-life groups in both countries have attacked the methodologies in such studies. Since "social science" is frequently a euphemism for ideology dressed up in the elaborate livery of statistics and jargon, the critics may be right.

But let us suppose that the social scientists are right. They observethat the majority of women who seek abortions in the U.S. are young, poor, unmarried, and black. And where do the preponderance of young male criminals come from? From mothers who are young, poor, unmarried, and black. So, if there are fewer births among this particular group of women thanks to legalized abortion, then ipso facto there will be less crime.

Assume this is correct. So what? A society that is prepared to execute 100% of its offspring would, within a single generation, be entirelyfree of crime. But who would be living there? And who would want to live there? What kind of society would it be?

It would be a eugenic society.

Scratch an abortionist, ancient or modern, and you will usually turn up a closet eugenicist. Back in the 1920s the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, called for the elimination of "inferior races,...morons, misfits, and the maladjusted". In the thirties, the world witnessed her eugenic impulse carried to its frenzied conclusion in Hitler's death camps for "inferior races." The world shuddered. Yet it took about thirty years for what had been a war crime to become acceptable public policy.

Today the eugenicists have come out of hiding and they once again claim that selective breeding will reduce crime. Well, maybe it will, but the abortion debate has never been about utility. It is about morality.

The question at the heart of the abortion debate is simply this: "Is life sacred"? If it is, then we are meant to live as a family, whose members may be of unequal abilities, but who are all unreservedly loved. If life is not sacred, then the eugenicist may propound the model of the factory farm, where offspring must measure up to a predetermined standard.

I am prepared to concede that among the approximately 50 million North American lives aborted since Roe v. Wade, there were no doubt murderers and rapists, thieves and miscellaneous felons. By the same token, there were also writers and musicians, priests and scholars. Christians do not judge someone's worth by what he does, but by what he is--namely a creature made in the image and likeness of God. When God created man, He pronounced him "very good"; so good, in fact, that we read that" the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy". Such a creature is not an expendable casualty in a war on crime.

But there is another objection. It is simply not true that one can predict the course of any human life from birth circumstances.

I heard the most memorable demonstration of this point on a muggy, hot May night in 1973 when I was with the late, great Malcolm Muggeridge; Muggeridge had come over from England to Ottawa to address a Festival of Life rally. To a sweltering standing-room crowd in Lansdowne Arena, Muggeridge said this:

"I wanted to tell you about a little playlet that some friends of mine devised.... The scene is a doctor's consulting room in Vienna round about 1770. A peasant woman comes in and tells the doctor that she is in her second month of pregnancy, that her husband is an alcoholic and has a syphilitic infection; that one of her children is mentally incapacitated, and there is a family history of deafness.

The doctor listens, and finally agrees that there is a case for her to have her pregnancy terminated. And so he has to fill in a form. Filling in the form, he asks her name, but he can't quite hear when she tells him, so he says, 'Please spell it out.' And she spells out: 'B-E-E-TH-O-V-E-N.' And then the Sixth Symphony strikes up."

Keep that vignette in mind the next time you read about how abortion reduces crime.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the Universityof Western Ontario and Malcolm Muggeridge's first biographer.