Friday, September 30, 2005

Abortion and Crime: whoa buddy

Bill Bennet, the once and former S. of Education said some fucked up shit:
'But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,'' said Bennett, author of ''The Book of Virtues.''

He went on to call that ''an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.''


The fact that he said this was pretty dumb, but the whole point of the recent bestseller Freakonomics was that Roe v. Wade reduced the crime rate by reducing the number of unwanted babies born. They argued that this didn't really justify abortion because the number of lives saved by avoiding murders was a supersmall fraction of the number of fetuses "killed" by abortion. But I think they are missing the point: not only did it reduce the number of murders, but it probably reduced the number of man-years spent in jail by a huge margin as well, which in some way is similar to "saving" a life. Thus, even if you do value the "lives" "destroyed" by abortion, there may still be a justification for it in utilitarian terms. This would bring about the question of how what portion of a life sacrificed is made up for by the improvement of another life. But since most pro-choice people don't even care about the foetus, I guess it doesn't matter.

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