My View

I got a couple of books for Christmas. One of them, Freakonomics, is actually really freaky. It’s all about an economist exploring different questions with the help of tools from economics.

One of the chapters has to do with a huge drop in the crime rate in the US at the beginning of the nineties. The author (Steven D. Levitt) argues that the popular explanations for the dropping crime rates such as better policing, stronger economy etc fail to count for the big drop in crime. The actual reason, he proposes (and gives good stats for), is the legalization of abortion (Roe vs Wade) about twenty years earlier (Jan 22, 1973). This would mean that many of “the undesirable elements of society”, poor and miserable teenagers who would have gone into crime, were simply never born.

Interesting theory, and might be true. This doesn’t mean that I condone or support abortion (and neither do the authors, at least not directly). Just the facts… (This last statement can really frustrate some non-NTs, read more about MBTI). Anyway, there are some hidden nuggets of information in this chapter. Did you know that there are about 1.6 million abortions every year in the US? This means that roughly every 3rd US child/fetus is aborted, never born (4 million births per year).

Which gets kind of personal, when I have three kids. Which of my three kids shouldn’t have been born? The first one? The second one? Third one? Impossible question, and skewed as well. Pro-abortion people would probably argue that you can’t compare a fetus to a child, but still. I do compare them. 1.6 million… that’s a huge number…