On Freakonomics and Abortion

In arguing in my previous post that Roe vs. Wade is much less politically relevant than believed by the mainstream Left, I left out one potential criticism recently raised by the bestselling book Freakonomics. The book, by economist Steven Levitt (along with journalist Stephen Dubner), advances the theory that Roe Vs. Wade caused the massive national decline in violent crime during the 1990s, because legalized abortion prevented the criminals who would have committed such acts from being born.

Of course, as one might expect, this claim has been attacked on multiple fronts, from moral criticisms by the Right to direct challenges of Levitt's statistical methods by other economists (here is one example). But given that pro-choicers will probably ignore the pro-life criticism and most non-economists (honestly, including myself) may lack the time to thoroughly analyze the statistical challenges, I'd like to offer a criticism from a different angle - Levitt's basic theory itself.

Levitt's claim that Roe vs. Wade caused the 1990s crime drop rests on a gigantic and unproven assumption - that the babies aborted since 1973 (when Roe was signed into law) would have contained a large criminal element. Levitt bases his view on the facts that Roe made abortions available to lower income women, and that low income today correlates with increased crime.

A correlation, however, is not the same as a cause. Low income was not always associated with crime; at the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, for example, national incomes plummeted yet crime failed to noticeably rise. Rather, low income and crime are together strongly linked to certain third factor causes, such as the lack of a father in the home. Plus, with the upward mobility common in American society, those with low incomes in the 1970s are by no means consigned to remain as such today.

No, Levitt does not prove his assumption, and in fact, he cannot prove it, because the people in question were never born. For all we know (and I would say this is a much more likely scenario), far from contributing to crime, these aborted babies would have instead solved America's social security crisis.

We commonly hear that "population aging" is the cause of social security's impending fiscal deficit, but the term is misleading. After all, everyone has always grown older, but the social security issue is a recent phenomenon. The real cause is that, unlike previous and current generations, the baby boomers born from 1948-1964 had fewer children than the number needed to replace themselves in the workforce. As a result, the next few decades will see a shortage of working age people needed to support the retiring boomers.

Now why did the baby boomers have so many fewer kids? Well, millions and millions of them were aborted following Roe vs. Wade in 1973.

That said, this conclusion is of course rooted in the assumption that the aborted children would have become, by and large, productive taxpaying members of society. Like Levitt's claim, I cannot prove this, because the people are not around for us to know.

But I certainly believe this is a more likely outcome than the one Levitt advances, and at the very least, it demonstrates how Freakonomics' abortion theory rests entirely on an unproven and unverifiable assertion. And as such, contrary to its claims, the book adds no relevance to the liberal support of Roe vs. Wade that I argue against below.