The Eugenicist Argument Emerges

In August two American social scientists created a stir in the mass media when they announced that a statistical decrease in crime during the past decade may be attributable to the legalization of abortion two decades earlier. As Catholic World News reported the story:

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford University law professor John Donohue III suggested that legalized abortion accounted for as much as half of the overall crime drop in the United States from 1991 to 1997, because the women whose children would have been most likely to commit crimes instead chose abortion. Thus a disproportionate number of would-be criminals of the 1990s were not born in the 1970s, the professors concluded.

Now it should be said immediately that this study represents exactly the sort of work that gives “social science” a bad name; it is much more “social” than “science.” Prudent social scientists are ever mindful of the fact that human behavior does not follow strict logical rules; one can never safely predict that a given set of circumstances will produce any specific sort of behavior. But in this case, the two have leapt far beyond the limits of logical analysis, and into the realm of pure guesswork. In effect, they are attempting to draw conclusions about the probable behavior of 40 million people who were never born!

In contemporary academe, it is fashionable to giggle over the purported absurdities of those scholastic theologians who asked how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But there was a purpose to that scholastic exercise; it taught students to recognize the dangers of false logic and especially of category errors. It was an exercise that Messrs. Levitt and Donohue might have found profitable.

40 million missing
It is true—indeed it is tautological—that aborted children cannot be criminals. Dead men break no laws. If there are 40 million individuals “missing” from the American population today, it follows that there are 40 million fewer potential criminals. There are also 40 million fewer potential carpenters, doctors, and dramatists; but Levitt and Donohue did not speculate that the Roe v. Wade decision could be partially responsible for the rising cost of American housing, the health-care crisis, or the difficulty in finding a worthwhile television program.

Why do the authors of this remarkable study concentrate their attention on the issue of crime? They explain that a disproportionate number of abortions were procured by women who were poor, ill educated, unmarried, and/or members of racial minority groups. Those same social categories also account for a disproportionate number of America’s active criminals. So Levitt and Dohonue leapt to the inference that the availability of legal abortion cut down on the number of children in the groups statistically most likely to include criminals.

There are flaws in that logic, however. In the decade following Roe v. Wade, the number of children born into those “risk categories” did not drop; in fact it soared. The illegitimacy rate climbed side-by-side with the abortion rate. So according to the assumptions embedded in this study, we should now be observing an increase in the incidence of crime.

Why stop there?
But let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we could identify the sort of women who were most likely to give birth to criminals. Should we then take legal action to prevent them from bearing children? There is at least some judicial precedent for such action; recall the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued for the sterilization of a retarded woman, with the cold, memorable phrase: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

For that matter, if we decide—as a matter of public policy—to encourage abortion among women from “undesirable” demographic groups, why should we stop there? Why not wait until the children reach adolescence, and then summarily execute—or at least quarantine—those who show anti-social tendencies? If an individual’s behavior is unalterably determined by his background, wouldn’t it make sense to take pre-emptive action, and eliminate the miscreants before they have time to misbehave?

That sort of ruthless, inhuman reasoning, which denigrates the free will and encourages racial hatred, has always been implicit among the arguments in favor of legal abortion. Those of us who embrace the pro-life cause should be in one sense relieved, and in another sense frightened, when our opponents make their eugenicist arguments so openly.

—Philip F. Lawler

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