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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.