Hello Alberto,
Always glad to share. Happy New Year to You !
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Abortion is opposed based on moral or religious grounds, but the ban leads to the psychological harm to a woman and to an unwanted child as well. Maybe a woman wants an abortion because she cannot care for the child and provide a healthy home environment.
Legalized abortion means that there are less unwanted children. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their book “Freakonomics” prove that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history.
In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, women got the right to abortion at least two years before it was legalized throughout the United States. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the early-legalizing states fell 13% compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23% more than those of the other states.
So, unwantedness leads to child poverty and high crime rates while legalized abortion is good for the society because it brings less crime. @Ja-Rek, @Pracownica, @matka, @JustMe, @Pepe, @mariolamayra, @ALaAl, @Adam, @Sonia, @AndrzejMazur, @EwaSJ, @michal.trzesimiech, @EwaJ-L, @miloskonjovic82, @Justin, @Wiciu, @Annaz, @Ewa_Dryjanska @johncoate
Although I am totally supporting legalization of abortion, the correlation between the data you are providing seems a bit too general to take as a conclusion that there is a direct link in between legal abortion and crime rates. Those early legalizing states might have adopted other measures that impacts the crime rate, maybe also related to woman rights or not, or other conditions like economic, political, cultural, could have impacted it. I am not saying there is no link, I am just saying the provided data are not precise enough to make that conclusion. Although it is quite obvious that unwanted kids could end up as criminals. Still saying “legalised abortion brings less crime” is somehow a simplification and shortcut of the whole situation.
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I had read the book Wolha is refering tom and honestly did not remember this correlation. Like you, I was also frowning while reading the above,
But by looking up things it turns out they remade the analysis 20 years after, with additional data, and the model holds up to at least an ongoing academic debate: New research linking abortion and crime reduction resurfaces old debate
In social science, it’s very hard to establish causation, a direct cause-effect links between phenomena, let alone to extrapolate findings from the US case to Poland or others, but it is an nonetheless an interesting thing to think about: What happens when you reduce the number of unwanted children, whether by legalising abortion or other measures? But do benefits of any public policy matter if the goal is not to solve the particular problem the benefits address?
If the goal is not to offer women freedom to decide for their own bodies, or uphold their right to privacy, (on the contrary!) then no policy that addresses that will go through. This looks more of a social justice debate that throughout history only got solved by mass protest movements, influential and charismatic leaders to prompt them… by the way are there such rising stars in Poland, where one could put their hopes in?
This is a beautiful statement.
that’s strange that you don’t remember the chapter dedicated to the Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies
It’s not so much about the chapter, it’s the ideas…and associations. And the case of Romanian abortion law had a different idea: that the wave of unwanted children in Romania was the same generation that came to age to (basically) build the revolution and overthrow the regime. Talk about karma.
Anyway, a very seductive idea, I’ll just leave it at that 