The bigotry of low expectations
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Charles Reichley
Published: March 6, 2008
In 2005, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, trying to make a point against abortion, argued “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” adding “that would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.” In response, writers such as William Saletan of Slate magazine castigated Bennett for “a bigotry” of “low expectations,” asking “Is it morally acceptable to predict the criminal propensity of unborn children based on the color of their skin?” and answering a resounding “NO.”
The movie “Minority Report” depicts a society with mutants who can see the future. Their ability is used to detect crimes before they are committed — at which point the “perpetrators” are arrested, charged and sentenced for those crimes. The movie raised the ethical question — can people be punished for what they are expected to do?
Of course, Bennett was not talking about punishment. He was trying to illustrate why you shouldn’t try to justify or oppose abortion based on perceived impacts to society and picked an outrageous example of “benefit” to show the absurdity of doing so. But in doing so, he implied that people could not be expected to overcome their circumstance, that in fact you could accurately forecast their future.
Of course it would be reprehensible to justify abortion by citing lower crime rates — or to suggest that you know aborting certain babies would decrease anti-social behavior. But such a suggestion was made by Steve Levitt, in his book “Freakonomics,” where he argued based on statistical analysis that abortion was the reason for the drop in the crime rate after 1994.
Levitt’s work was cited by Gary Jacobsen in Tuesday’s column “The crime rate is falling. Why?” He quotes Levitt’s conclusion that “Poor, unmarried and teenage mothers” were “the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born.”
In 1977, Jesse Jackson said “Abortion is black genocide.” Levitt argued that environment, not race, was the key in his study. However, the “environment” he cites is one primarily experienced by minorities, who are also disproportionately both the victims and the perpetrators of the “crimes.”
In 1939, Sanger’s organization launched the “Negro Project” to push birth control on the minority population. Today blacks make up about 13 percent of the population, but obtain more than one third of all abortions.
Some opponents say racism still drives parts of the pro-choice movement. One anti-abortion group posed as a donor looking to fund abortions targeted to the “black community.” In one case their actor exclaimed “the less black kids out there the better,” to which a Planned Parenthood worker responded “understandable.”
I think abortion opponents overplay this hand, as Bennett tried to illustrate in his ill-fated remarks. Abortion is wrong NOT because it targets minorities, but simply because killing children is wrong. Likewise, arguing that abortion is justified because we killed the “right” babies and thereby lowered the crime rate is reprehensible, suggesting we should punish innocent children for their perceived future criminal behavior.
This would be true even if Levitt’s argument was sound. But there are questions about his data and his conclusions.
For example, Levitt presumes that abortion reduced the “unwanted babies” which would tend to be criminals. But after Roe, pregnancies went up by 30 percent, while births only dropped six percent.
Most abortions aren’t to kill previously unwanted babies, but are simply a new form of birth control.
Abortion should stand or fall on its own merits. If abortion kills an innocent person, you can’t justify it by claiming that person was likely to be a criminal eventually.
But as humanity comes to the conclusion that the pre-born infant is in fact a person, those who defend the right to choose to kill that person for the benefit of others will need to reach for increasingly distasteful arguments to justify that killing.
Charles Reichley has been a Prince William County resident since 1981. He can be reached at {encode="critically " title="critically "}.
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Posted by ( mrbill ) on March 06, 2008 at 11:08 am
seb 21 , my nephew was born 3 months early. according to your logic, he was a fetus worthy of being aborted.now he is a loved,nurtured human being,just as he was when he was created.
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Posted by ( seb21 ) on March 06, 2008 at 9:04 am
An abortion is not the equivalent of a killing, Mr. Reichley. What you fail to realize is the reasons behind the choice to have an abortion performed. In many cases, the woman may have become pregnant not by her own volition, but rather due to rape. For others, it is simply because the expectant mother realizes that for whatever reason (which could be an inability to support herself financially, physically or mentally, her age, et cetera) that she will be unable to provide the life that her child deserves. No one goes to the abortion clinic smiling about what they are about to do. It is devastating enough for her to make that journey without the help of pro-lifers verbally beating her down all the way to the door. You are correct, you cannot justify it by expecting the child to eventually turn to crime, and not one person has an abortion for that reason. It is only the observers, comfortable in their own lives that could summon the gall to make such a claim. Abortion stops the fetus from becoming a life, and that is not the same as killing a child. I am surprised that pro-life advocates have not gone as far to say that letting an egg go unfertilized is the same as killing a child, for that sentiment is just as ridiculous as the one mentioned in the last two paragraphs of this article.
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