I believe I first heard about this study on a Freakonomics podcast. It doesn't address the moral issues, of which there are arguments on both sides. But it's interesting.
Personally I would have a hard time with the decision to abort an unwanted pregnancy. But it'll never be my decision to make. The clearly more preferable situation would be to prevent unwanted pregnancies altogether, but in the real world real people face this decision. I more support their right to make the decision than I oppose it but it's troubling.
Note, I didn't post the actual study, but a discussion of it. If interested, you can find the actual study on your own pretty easily.
Link: https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/
That was the argument 120 years ago.
If the state takes your kid(s) or if you fail to pay child support, next time that happens you're done.
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LEVITT: So it’s not that easy to convince people that there’s a causal impact of legalized abortion on crime, because this is certainly not a setting in which I’m ever going to be allowed to, say, run a randomized experiment in which I decide who does or doesn’t get abortions. Instead, what we have to do by necessity is to look at a collage of evidence. So a bunch of different, all quite imperfect sources of variation, that allow us to get some sense of whether there might be some causality between legalized abortion and crime.
it hasn't been proven to be evidence.
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…to make the assertion that you can predict even a few of the complex variables which determine a life of crime vs not and a crime rate is nothing more than guess work. I’m sorry that I’m being argumentative- I like your posts, but one would have to be omniscient AND be able to see the future to make such a claim.
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You can either listen or read the transcript if you are so inclined.
Link: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisited/
know that? I could point to many people who openly have professed their mothers considered aborting them that have created wonderful lives. How do you know this isn’t possible in most cases. Suppose a child who could one day cure cancer is aborted. We will never know.
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Godwin award goes to me.
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The health and wellbeing of the mother is a factor too.
I don't think it's unreasonable to state that some life situations are worse than death or that some people's lives are so miserable they'd be better off if they hadn't been born.
Are "souls" a one off sort of situation in your opinion? And at what point do they arive in the body?
Like I said below, it's complicated.
I was always pretty skeptical of the result. A few things to keep in mind:
1) Black men are much more likely to commit a crime.
2) Black women are much more likely to get an abortion.
3) The study was done at a time when crime rates were going down.
If you try to study a factor that results in fewer of 1 because of the actions of 2 while 3 is also happening (perhaps for completely different reasons - enforcement, incarceration, etc) you can get a result like that. I'm sure the people behind the study thought of that and tried to adjust for it. But, let's face it, there is really no way to discuss this topic without finding yourself in a very dangerous minefield.
They weren't looking for a correlation between abortion and Crime, but sort of stumbled onto it by chance.
There are lots of ways we could lower the crime rate that would be unacceptable to society. We could lock people up for 30 years after their first felony, etc.
I remain skeptical of the result, and even if true it is not a good argument for abortion, imo.
our abortion policy to continue because it reduces crime is not really compelling.
Our abortion policy also decreases the number of Democrats but I still don't support it.
It's not a binary issue for many, perhaps most people.
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