I just read Steven Levitt and Stephan Dubners “Freakonomics”. I have perused the SD message boards related to this topic and heard some debate about Levitt’s very controversial but convincing findings that indicate Roe V. Wade correlated to the decline of crime in the 1990’s. I think this is a fascinating conclusion/thesis and certainly worthy of debate.
Has anyone collected data focussing on Catholic crime rates post Roe V. Wade? It seems like this might be a fascinating control group to study.
Has offficial Catholic resistance to leagalized abortion caused less Catholics to recieve the procedure compared to others? If so–how much? Has “Catholic” crime risen or dropped?
If Levitt’s thesis is correct, and if Catholic ideology is practiced on the ground, then it seems that Catholic crime rates would be increasing—woldn’t it?
I don’t see why. His thesis is that abortion prevented the births of children who were more likely than average to be criminals - predominantly, black inner city children.
If catholic children are no more likely to be criminals than children in society at large, then a change in the Catholic birth rate would have no appreciable effect on crime, and would be useless as a control.
What you need is a control group from the same cohort - for example if abortion were state law rather than federal, if you could find an inner-city population where abortion was legal, and one where it was illegal, you could then compare them. The Catholic population is just too different.
That said, it turns out that there were some methodological problems with Levitt’s study, so I think it’s fair to say that the results are in question.
I don’t think Levitt’s study had anything to do with race or religion–that’s why I think it would be interesting to study numbers from a specific religion “catholicism” during the same time period. The interesting feature of these two studies is that one group presumably has less of a chance to have an abortion “catholics”. Which is the firsrt presumption that I need to get good data on before reaching any conclusion.
The study didn’t have anything to do with race per se. As I recall, the theory was that the people most likely to use abortion were young single women, so preventing abortion meant more births to low income single mother families, and those children are typically much more likely to become criminals. So what you’d want to find is another group of unwed, low income mothers in a state where abortion is illegal, then track the change in crime rate. Or something like that. There’s no doubt a zillion other variables that have to be controlled for, and I think that’s where Levitt screwed up, if indeed he did.
Race only enters the picture because this devolves into a study of children born in the urban inner cities, and they are primarily black and hispanic, as I understand it. It’s also where most of the crime happens.
Studying the effect of abortion on Catholic girls just doesn’t seem to help here. They’re too different. Unwed Catholic girls usually have large support systems around them that unwed mothers in the inner city have. Their children don’t grow up in desperation and without role models.
Perhaps you could use the example of Hispanic single mothers, then, who are overwhelmingly Catholic.
That said, it’s not even accurate to assume Catholics will necessarily avoid abortions. As you point out, the variables here are staggeringly hard to get a hold of.
There’s something some of you are missing. Athough the official position from the Vatican forbids abortion and most birth control, a whole lot of Catholic families stray from that. One survey I saw said over half of Catholics use a forbidden form of birth control. A woman who ran an abortion clinic told me a surprising number of her clients were Catholics, many bringing their daughters in. She said the three words that most quickly turn a Pro-Lifer into a Pro-Choicer are, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.”
My point is that you cannot extrapolate to any safe conclusion about Catholic crime when so many refuse to follow the Pope’s advice.
The problem of choosing Catholics as a group is that Latino immigration swelled the numbers of catholics and catholics that became criminals. How to measure the impact of the supposed lack of abortion when obviously the numbers get mixed up by too many other factors ?
Also like Asknott mentioned… Catholics become pro-choice quite quick when they need an abortion…
I’m sure there are many people who call themselves Catholics who pick and choose which Church teachings to follow. Some of these folks may even be hypocrites who change those same beliefs when it’s convenient. But are you suggesting all or most Catholics have such shallow convictions? And by that I don’t mean a Catholic who always believes that birth control is none of the Pope’s business. I’m talking about a pro-lifer who abandons her principles because of a pregnancy.
The closest thing to this is that the crime rate dropped in New York before the rest of the country, and New York legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. However I don’t know if the correlation is significant.
I find that particular Freakonomics piece more irrelevant than right or wrong. Whether abortion is good or bad for crime, the economy, the chances that the Cubs will ever win another World Series, etc., etc., isn’t going to turn a single soul from pro-life to pro-choice, or vice versa. If you believe that a fertilized egg/embryo/fetus is the moral equivalent of you and me, then you’re not likely to believe that women should have the right to make their own decision to end that life, no matter how strong the reasons. If you believe that it’s something considerably less than that at a given point of its development, you’re likely to believe that a woman has the right to make her own decisions concerning what to do with that life at that point in its development.
The limited amount of evidence that supports an argument one way or the other on that central point is germane; all else is window dressing.
I’d agree that it’s unlikely to turn someones position on pro-life/pro-choice. It does indicate that programs such as sex-education, free condoms, easily available day-after pills, etc. can greatly affect the crime rate. Abortions aren’t the only way to avoid having children born into poor, single parent homes after all.
I don’t think that was the point. Rather, he was trying to disprove the claims of Republicans that it was their ‘law and order’ policies that led to a drop in crime. Guliani’s ‘broken windows’ theory, better policing, vigorous enforcement of drug laws, mandatory sentencing, that sort of thing.
When the crime rates dropped, there were a million people on the right and left claiming credit for it. Was it midnight basketball that did it? Perhaps welfare reform? Success has a thousand fathers. So even if we will never change abortion policy due to this, it’s still very important to know.
As loud as the backlash was from conservatives on this theory, I’ve always thought that it’s conclusion was basically something that conservatives should have treated as a “well, duh” one. After all, another way to think about the results is not less “bad” childern as some seem to take it, but less bad parenting. If bad parenting can lead to criminal lifestyles and poor values (something I agree with and most conservatives would as well), then less instances of bad parenting in our society than normal would lead to better social results overall.
Levitt rightly notes that as a way of preventing crime, abortion is remarkably ineffective costwise: even if all you count is the cost of one abortion it really isn’t worth it, particularly when there are much much cheaper alternatives for reducing crime.
As for methological problems, the most I’ve ever seen are one or two errors that basically worked out to be immaterial to the overall conclusion (the worst I saw amounted to a rather small reduction of the overall effect). They checked these results in not just one way, but many different ways, using many different sets of data (in different countries) and theories of causality. Given the plausibility of the causal mechanism and the robustness of the data, I don’t have too much skepticism about the results at this point. Since they don’t really have much in the way of social policy implications, I don’t think they should really be as violently controversial as they’ve proven.
It is. The timing of the legalization of abortion prior to Roe matches the subsequent drop in crime rate in that city/state to a close degree, thereby providing causal linkage.
I read somewhere years ago that Catholic women in Chicago were MORE likely to have abortions than members of other faiths, because they considered the one big sin (abortion) to be less of a problem than many minor sins (birth control). Hard choices Rome makes for its believers.
