- After Roe v. Wade, conceptions increased by 30 percent.
- The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has reported that child abuse has increased more than 1,000 percent since Roe v. Wade.
- The cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born after the Roe v.Wade decision was much more likely to commit homicides than the cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born before Roe v. Wade.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 10:51 AM
January 23rd, 2013 | 11:01 am
All intriguing, and sad, associations. A suggestion for the Snopesters among us: Always provide a direct link to original source material for statistics like these. Their meaning may be debatable, (endlessly), but their veracity should be instantly confirmable.
#2 strikes me as the most telling.
January 23rd, 2013 | 11:52 am
I’m pro-life, and I want to get riled up over these statistics. However, I seem to remember something about the relation between correlation and causation…
January 23rd, 2013 | 12:05 pm
What a curious collection of assertions.
The Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when the US population was 211,908,788. Today the US population is 311,591,917, or 47 percent larger. So if conceptions have increased by only 30 percent, I’d be astonished. Admittedly, the nation is aging, so that would contribute to the decline….
The linked article also discusses out-of-wedlock births – not just the absolute number of out-of-wedlock births, but the rate. Sure enough, the rate has increased since Roe v. Wade was issued. But the linked article has a graph showing that the rate of out-of-wedlock births has been increasing at roughly the same rate since 1955. I have difficulty crediting Roe v. Wade with causing a phenomenon that began 20 years earlier.
Ok, the child abuse one’s a real puzzler — and an alarming one. I’d like to learn more about that.
In criticizing the Levitt/Donohue article purporting to show that legalized abortion correlates with reduced crime rates, Michael J. New notes that the relevant data are influenced by the confounding variable of the crack epidemic. I wonder if the crack epidemic might help explain the child abuse and youth homicide rates, too.
Again, the linked article has a handy graph showing that, yes, youth homicide rates peaked…
January 23rd, 2013 | 12:07 pm
The cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born after the Roe v.Wade decision was much more likely to commit homicides than the cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born before Roe v. Wade.
It doesn’t seem to me this is a “fact about Roe” unless a solid cause can be found. (The same is true of the others.) There are many things that have happened after Roe that are not attributable to Roe. Many of these social problems are also attributed to contraception in general or the birth control pill in particular. Or the “sexual revolution,” which began before Roe.
January 23rd, 2013 | 12:27 pm
The first statistic, on rates of conception, belies the pro-choice argument that women largely do not use abortion as a form of (or in lieu of) birth control. The second, on the prevalence of child abuse, exposes the false promise that abortion would ensure that only children who are wanted and loved are born. But the number of teen homicides? While equally sad, the teen homicide rate, as far as I know, doesn’t relate directly to any of the common “pro-choice” arguments.
Both abortion and teen homicide are symptoms of a disintegrating social fabric and a cultural devaluation of life, but that belongs to a broader discussion. The relationship between the two is more tenuous. One could probably find that the number of highway fatalities and the number of deaths due to lung cancer were also higher after Roe v. Wade than before, but they don’t relate to the debate on abortion. More poignant are the statistics on other social ills that abortion was supposed to remedy — female teen suicide, teen pregnancy, single parenthood, out-of-wedlock births, etc.
January 23rd, 2013 | 1:39 pm
George, what’s relevant here is that abortion was supposed to reduce unwanted conception, unwanted abused children, and children raised in circumstances that make them more susceptible to criminal behavior.
I wouldn’t suggest that abortion has *caused* all these things, but apparently it hasn’t done much to prevent them, as we’ve been told it should.
January 23rd, 2013 | 1:41 pm
I am also pro-life but I agree with George: Post hoc ergo propter hoc. That said, I’m all for finding causation here.
January 23rd, 2013 | 1:46 pm
I had a little bet with myself, on how long it would be before somebody brought up the correlation/causation point. I owe myself 10 bucks. I’m pretty sure that New knows the difference, and a 1 paragraph blog post isn’t exactly the place to lay out all of the factors that might enable one to move from noticing a correlation to arguing for causation.
January 23rd, 2013 | 1:55 pm
I second George’s comment. These statistics are presented completely out of context to imply a causal relationship, when in fact the author of the article that is cited simply means to follow up on old promises that legal abortion “would guarantee fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates remains unfulfilled.” Legalized abortion may not have brought about reductions in any of these, but no one has presented a compelling argument that it caused the increases, either.
January 23rd, 2013 | 2:49 pm
Among the other weaknesses of the original post, the cited data does not contradict the idea that legalized abortion produced fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, or lower crime rates.
The relevant question is, “Fewer/Less/Lower than what?” The author refers to data comparing various data from before Roe to after Roe. But the more useful analysis is to compare the actual data after Roe to what the data would have been in the absence of the Roe ruling. It’s entirely possible that out-of-wedlock birth rates, child abuse, and crime would have been even worse in the absence of the Roe ruling.
No, we can never know for sure. That’s the joy and struggle of public policy analysis.
January 23rd, 2013 | 5:45 pm
Before we get all riled up, can someone link to the studies?
January 24th, 2013 | 7:55 am
•The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has reported that child abuse has increased more than 1,000 percent since Roe v. Wade.
More likely an artifact of reporting regimes. Just from ancedotes shared with me by older people (and I’m sure many here have had the same experience), there was a lot of stuff people did decades ago and got away with that today would land them at least under investigation today.
January 24th, 2013 | 7:55 am
•The cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born after the Roe v.Wade decision was much more likely to commit homicides than the cohort of 14-to-17-year-olds born before Roe v. Wade.
I suggest looking at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Between 1960-1973 the murder rate ranged from 5.1 to 9.4 per 100K people. After 1973 there was a peak at 10.2 in 1980 and a march downward to 4.7 in 2011.
I’ve pointed out elsewhere that the most biased reporting in the world comes from pro-lifer news outlets and this is probably an example. Even assuming the above ‘factoid’ is true, notice how oddly it’s constructed. Why only care about homicides committed by people 14-17 yrs old? Given Roe is 40 years old why not also look at homicides by 20 yr olds? 30 yr olds? Even just 18 yr olds or those below 14? Clearly because the authors had an agenda to demonstrate Roe is bad so they cherry picked data to illustrate that and censored data that cuts the other way.
And why exactly are we even asking about the homicide rate of children born post Roe? What’s the thesis here? That women who *didn’t* get abortions gave birth to more killers after Roe than before? (Or gave birth to 17 yr old killers but not 18 yr old killers?)
January 24th, 2013 | 9:42 am
Curious argument from nobody.really. We can’t know what would have happened, therefore data of what did happen don’t matter. This argument invalidates any argument for change based on improving something simply because we can’t know what would have happened whether we made the change or not.
Nekliw’s got the right idea in my mind. Let’s look at the studies and draw our conclusions there. Schmitz’ post is, to me, a call to just that. He makes no claims but rather notes some correlations. Are they connected? I think we can get a clue by looking at the details contra the “We can’t know anything,” of nobody.really.
January 24th, 2013 | 11:59 am
I apologize for being unclear. I meant to say that if we want to understand the effect of Roe v. Wade, conceptually we need to analyze how the world changed as a result of Roe v. Wade — not merely how the world changed. Thus, in my earlier remarks, I acknowledged that the annual numbers of conceptions and rates of out-of-wedlock births had both increased since Roe. And then I noted reasons to conclude that these changes were unrelated to Roe. But you’ll only know to look for other changes if you know that the relevant question is not “Has there been change over time?” but “Has there been change relative to what we could have expected?”
And yes, this type of analysis is challenging. Apparently, even understanding the need for this type of analysis is challenging. But that’s the substance of public policy analysis.
January 24th, 2013 | 2:25 pm
Pentamom nails it as usual. The argument here isn’t that Roe v. Wade is responsible for these trends, it is that people who supported legalized abortion once claimed that it would reduce the number of unwanted children (and therefore child abuse) while it was later claimed that abortion had reduced the crime rate. In short, legalized abortion was supposed to be good for society. Reality has not been kind to these sorts of claims.
January 24th, 2013 | 8:13 pm
Tim speaks sooth. The contention is not that R/W caused anything, but that is failed to cause certain things. That correlation ≠ causation is moot when the argument is that the causation is not in fact there.
If I wear garlic I cannot point to the absence of vampires to argue that garlic drives them away. But I certainly can use it as evidence that garlic does not attract them.
January 24th, 2013 | 8:13 pm
pentamom
I wouldn’t suggest that abortion has *caused* all these things, but apparently it hasn’t done much to prevent them, as we’ve been told it should.
Well as I pointed out in 1980 the murder rate was 10 per 100,000. Since 1980 was only 7 yrs after Roe and few 7 yr olds kill people most of those murders were born well before the Roe era.
Today the murder rate is 4.7, lower than it was ever and lower than the years right before Roe. Since fewer people over 40 murder most murders today were born within the Roe era.
So I have two questions/observations:
1. Just say abortion did do what you claim people said it would, what would it look like? Might it look like the murder rate getting cut in half? Might it look like the rate being lower than ever in over half a century?
2. Since that actually did happen to the murder rate, why are you saying ‘apparently it hasn’t done much to prevent them’? The answer seems to be the pro-life media outlets put a lot of effort into cherry picking data to create their own reality here rather than trying to honestly understand reality. Is there a less complicated, more plausible reason to focus on such an odd metric as the article above does?
This dishonesty is more distressing because it’s not actually required by the pro-life position. One can be honest about the murder rate and child abuse but assert legal abortion doesn’t cause it. Or one can even assert that abortion did cause those good things *but* it’s still immoral enough to reject legal abortion….or alternative ways can be found to reject abortion but keep those good things.
January 24th, 2013 | 8:43 pm
BTW, it’s difficult to get stats quickly about which age groups do the most murders, but from what I can find it seems only 3% of murderers are less than 17 yrs old.
Strike 1. By focusing on such a small portion of the murderer cohort, this really smells like cherry picked data.
Per https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/228479.pdf
The juvenile murder arrest rate in 2008 was 3.8, which is 74% less than its peak in 1993 of 14.4.
The definition of a juvenile in that is 10-17 yrs old so use 15 yrs old as a good average. That would mean in 2008 the juvenile killer was born around 1993. During the peak in 1994 the juvenile killer was born in 1979…
In 1979 the abortions per 1,000 live births was 428.6. In 1993 it was 373.1. One way to read that is abortions having nothing to do with juveniles being killers. Another way, though, might be to read it as ‘casual’ abortions declining leaving behind a core of ‘serious abortions’ done by women who know they are in bad conditions with more selective abortions in 1993 producing a huge decline in teen killers 15 yrs later. What doesn’t seem plausible, though, is to read it as teen murders going up after Roe.
For those interested today the rate is about 285.4. Almost at the level it was in 1973 (237.4) when Roe first came out.
January 26th, 2013 | 2:26 pm
Boonton,
Pro-choicers made specific claims about what legalized abortion would do, so you are going to have to do better than point out a mere correlation between falling rates of violent crime and Roe. I could just as easily point out that the increasing ownership of guns has also correlated with the drop in crime. That an increasing number of prisons built and criminals jailed has correlated with the drop in violent crime.
I’m sure you have heard of the book Freakanomics by Levitt and Dubner, the book that got this whole debate started in earnest. You should know that the section of the book on how legalized abortion reduced the crime rate was based on a paper developed by one of the authors a few years earlier (1999 I think it was), which specifically made the point that it was the high rates of abortion among black women that contributed to the drop in crime. For their book Freakanomics, they airbrushed out any mention of race to make it more palatable for a general readership. So if you really want to hang your hat on this argument, know full well that it is an argument of the eugenicists of old.
Fortunately, there exists a great deal of evidence that Dubner and Levitt were just plain wrong in their research.
See here for a overview. If you have time, there are a lot of links.
http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm
January 27th, 2013 | 2:05 pm
Tim,
I didn’t make any claims about abortion causing anything. The problem here isn’t that I haven’t done enough to establish causation with abortion and falling crime, it’s that pro-lifers don’t seem to care about simply telling the truth here. Why are you asking me to establish a correlation between abortion and *falling* crime when we have a thread here asserting rising crime? This is why I asked Pentamom “Just say abortion did do what you claim people said it would, what would it look like? “. It seems pretty clear to me the first choice here is to just pretend it doesn’t.
In other words, if it starts raining right after the big rain dance. Assert we’re in a drought. If someone actually points out its pouring rain, then demand that person prove its the rain dance that caused it.
which specifically made the point that it was the high rates of abortion among black women that contributed to the drop in crime. For their book Freakanomics, they airbrushed out any mention of race to make it more palatable for a general readership. So if you really want to hang your hat on this argument, know full well that it is an argument of the eugenicists of old.
If I recall correctly, his thesis was not that eugenics but situations. Women in bad ways opt for abortion but later go on to have children during better periods in their lives. Since blacks suffer higher rates of poverty and other problems, a higher abortion rate would not be shocking and would not require one to adopt a eugenic worldview.
January 28th, 2013 | 9:44 pm
Boonton,
This thread has fallen off the main page so there’s a good chance you won’t read this, but the third statistic presented is the evidence against Dubner and Levitt’s claim. The overall crime rate has indeed gone down, but it went up among the first cohort to survive legalized abortion. Now, was this because of legalized abortion? I have no idea, but I doubt it. The point is, the evidence cuts against the claim that legalized abortion reduced the crime rate, even if the overall crime rate has gone down.
January 29th, 2013 | 6:51 am
Tim,
Thanks for hanging in there. The counter Levitt case hings on the murder rate of 14-17 yr olds going up briefly. But as I pointed out, if someone is going to be a murderer, 95% of the time they are going to do it between 18-40 yrs old. The murder rate by a small cohort can go up dramatically when it’s a very low portion of murders to begin with. For example, the murder committed by Amish women may rise 5000% even when the murder rate of the communities where Amish live are falling.
In other words, the post-Roe cohort that was otherwise on tract to start killing at 18+ veered to a different track of not kiling ever. Even if a small number started killing in the 14-17 range, driving that rate up for a few years, the thesis remains viable.
Note that your argument is at least unbiased in that you include relevant information that doesn’t help your argument. You admit that the overall rate has fallen dramatically, better than the above which implies the opposite.
January 29th, 2013 | 12:09 pm
Let me illustrate it with a more potent example. There are very few murders by 9 year olds in any given year. Let’s just say in 1981 there was only 1, but in 1982 there was 2. So 9 years after Roe the murder rate by 9 year olds has leaped 100%!!!!! When dealing with a small base, you see, not only is it easy to get tabloid grabbing headlines in the data but it’s also not clear the metric really has any relationship to the overall murder rate or much of anything. It would be a bit unfair to tar an entire generation as murders simply because their cohort had two instead of one murders at 9 yrs old, wouldn’t it? If that generation went on to murder at a rate much lower than previous ones, you’d have a huge drop in murders despite the claim about 9 yr olds.
Two put it more bluntly, suppose I said by pushing a button you could make today’s generation of babies have twice the murdering rate from 14-17 but from 18 and beyond have 25% less. Since most killers kill in the 18+ zone, pushing that button would save many lives and result in fewer murders.
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