Nipping Felons in the Bud
David P. Mortimer on Abortion & Crime Reduction
In 1729, Jonathan Swift presented, in an anonymous pamphlet, a commonsense solution to the intractable problems of Irish hunger, poverty, crime, and the problem of unwanted children. In A Modest Proposal, he suggested that a fourth of the younger children be fattened and sold in the market for food. 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. Simply turn the problem into a profitable solution for the greater good.
The attitude to human life Swift satirized has now been given apparent scientific and economic support. The “unwanted” unborn are valued only for the effect they will have on society as a whole. The embryo or fetus may be harvested for his tissue or stem cells to benefit society or eliminated before birth if someday he may (only may) harm society.
A year ago, 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.” Their study, “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime” was published in the May 2001 issue of Harvard’s prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics.
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.” These academics are speaking America’s love language: cost savings to the taxpayer and greater safety for all.
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. These women, they argue, are more at risk of having children who would grow up to engage in criminal activity. With abortion eliminating these bad apples, fewer criminals are around 20 years later to steal BMWs, slash their tires, or sell crack to their owners.
The theory is based on a kind of statistical racial profiling: Children born to disadvantaged women have “poor life prospects,” tend to grow up in poverty, and are “resented” and “unwanted.” The authors contend that many of these children grow up fatherless, and tend not to be held, breastfed, rocked, or nurtured by their mothers. In short: Poor minority families are the seedbed of criminality. Therefore, higher abortion rates for this group have resulted in a huge windfall in reduced crime.
Unwitting Eugenics
It will not be known for years whether or not the Harvard “pariah theory’s” methodology is valid. 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. By dusting off the old eugenic correlation between growing up in poverty and criminal tendencies, these academics have brought scientific support to the legal holding of Roe v. Wade.
Worst of all, the “pariah theory” has all the benefits that once evaded the pseudoscientific and racist eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In Europe and America, the power of the state was used to prevent, segregate, sterilize, or eliminate “the unfit.” 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.”
Since crime, insanity, idiocy, imbecility, and epilepsy were thought to be hereditary, these institutionalized people were, in the words of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, “by the propagation of their kind a menace to society.” By contrast, the eugenics of today is based upon respectable science (and prestigious scientists), sounds like common sense, is not coercive, is blessed by the rule of law, and is enveloped in a theory of rights, choice, and freedom.
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more on abortion from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
19.1—January/February 2006
on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter
more from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
35.6—Nov/Dec 2022
on the Divine Promise Fulfilled by the Child of Bethlehem by James M. Kushiner
32.4—July/August 2019
Does Biblical Language for Man Matter? by Stephen F. Noll
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