http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02126.html

This guy used to be the Secretary of Education. That's a little scary.

Bennett Under Fire for Remark on Crime and Black Abortions

By Brian Faler
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, September 30, 2005; Page A05

Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders denounced conservative commentator William J. Bennett yesterday for suggesting on his syndicated radio show that aborting black children would reduce the U.S. crime rate.

The former U.S. education secretary-turned-talk show host said Wednesday 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." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down."

Bennett's comments, flagged by the liberal news media watchdog group Media Matters for America, were quickly condemned by Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who issued a statement demanding that Bennett apologize. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) circulated a letter, signed by 10 of his colleagues, demanding that the Salem Radio Network suspend Bennett's show.

Wade Henderson, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, demanded that the show be canceled.

"Bennett's statement is outrageous. As a former secretary of education, he should know better," Henderson said. "His program should be pulled from the air."

A spokeswoman for Salem Radio Network did not return three calls requesting comment.

Bennett, education secretary under then-President Ronald Reagan and director of drug policy during George H.W. Bush's administration has written a number of books stressing the importance of traditional values, including the 1993 bestseller "The Book of Virtues."

In 2003, he admitted he was a heavy gambler after news reports that he had lost millions of dollars in casinos.

Bennett's comments came Wednesday, during a discussion on his talk show "Morning in America." A caller had suggested that Social Security would be better funded if abortion had not been legalized in 1973 because the nation would have more workers paying into the system.

Bennett said "maybe," before referring to a book he said argued that the legalization of abortion is one of the reasons the crime rate has declined in recent decades. Bennett said he did not agree with that thesis.

"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," Bennett said, according to an audio clip posted on Media Matters for America's Web site. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, you know, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

But it's okay for leftists to say that abortion has reduced crime?

If you're asking for personal opinions, I don't think it's right for ANYONE to say that abortion reduces crime. It's suggesting that the unborn are destined for a certain life. This is the article I saw. If you have articles sugesting that a left wing opinion is that abortion reduces crime, put it up. I'd like to read it and ridicule it too.

Additionally, I did not post this because this guy is more conservative than I. I posted it because I thought it was an interesting viewpoint as well as interesting that he would have the balls to say it on the radio. If Michael Moore said this you'd better believe I would find it just as appalling. Left, right... who cares. If you're saying crazy things, I'm going to have to wonder why.

No truth to the rumour abortion reduces crime

by Steve Sailer

National Post of Canada, Tuesday, August 24, 1999

Did legalizing abortion in 1973 drive down the U.S. crime rate in the mid-to-late '90s? Professors Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John J. Donohue of Stanford have bravely outraged pro-lifers and embarrassed pro-choicers. They argue that aborting millions of "unwanted" foetuses in the 1970s means the survivors were less likely to grow up to be vicious thugs in the 1990s. Thus, they attribute half the recent sharp fall in crime to legal abortion.

By emphasizing the unwantedness of the aborted (as opposed to, say, their racial makeup), Levitt and Donohue try to cling to a semblance of political correctness. But they also note that African-Americans have three times the abortion rate of whites. That fact is essential to any theorizing about abortion and crime because, as the U.S. Department of Justice notes, "Blacks are eight times more likely than whites to commit homicide." Levitt and Donohue argue, in effect, that legal abortion means fewer but better blacks. To the discomfort of the right-to-choose movement, though, this argument inevitably reminds us that plenty of other white supporters of abortion have long whispered that abortion's chief eugenic benefit is simply fewer blacks.

Since moralizing is easy while analyzing is hard, almost all pundits have merely assumed Levitt's and Donohue's highly statistical 63-page paper is correct, and then went on to chatter about the meaning of it all. This theory is so important, though, that it demands intense scrutiny. Fortunately, we can easily test the most obvious prediction of their logic: that babies born soon after 1973 should have grown up to be especially law-abiding teens in the early '90s. Did they?

Not exactly. Instead, they went on the worst youth murder spree in U.S. history. According to FBI statistics, the murder rate in 1993 for 14- to 17-year-olds (born in the high abortion years of 1975-1979) was a horrifying 3.6 times higher than that of the kids who were the same age in 1984 (who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966-1970). In dramatic contrast, over the same time span the murder rate for those 25 and over (all born before legalization) dropped 6%.

What about just black male youths? Since their mothers were having abortions at three times the white rate, their murder rate should have fallen spectacularly from 1984 to 1993. Instead it grew an apocalyptic 5.1 times.

Why, then, is this generation born in 1975-1979 now committing relatively fewer crimes as it ages? It makes no sense to give the credit to abortion. Instead, it's the rise and fall of the crack cocaine epidemic that largely drove crime first up, then down. Thus, the crime rate has fallen fastest exactly where it had previously grown fastest due to crack -- in the biggest cities and among young black males. This generation born right after legalization is better behaved today in large part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs, and coffins. For example, over the past two decades the United States has doubled the number of black males in prison to nearly one million.

Encouragingly, the biggest decline in murder from 1993 to 1997 was among the newest generation of black males aged 14-17. These kids born in the early 1980s survived abortion levels similar to those faced by the crime-ridden 1975-1979 generation. Yet, their murder rate in 1997 was less than half that of the 14 to 17-year-olds of 1993. Seeing their big brothers gunned down in drive-by shootings and their big sisters becoming crack whores may have scared them straight.

Now, it's theoretically possible that without abortion the black youth murder rate would have, say, sextupled instead of merely quintupling. Still, there's a more interesting question. Why, as Prof. Levitt admits, did the states with the highest abortion rates in the '70s tend to suffer the worst crack-driven crime waves in the early '90s? The most obvious answer is that the liberal politics and permissive social attitudes that made abortion popular in places such as New York City and Washington D.C. also contributed to the crack epidemic. For example, D.C. enjoyed both the highest abortion rate in the U.S. and a popular mayor, Marion Barry, who was himself a crackhead.

It's possible legal abortion itself helped fuel the carnage of the crack years. In the '70s, paradoxically, both the abortion rate and the illegitimacy rate (closely linked to the crime rate) soared. Why? One answer might be that legalizing abortion finished off the traditional shotgun wedding. Earlier, the birth control pill had shifted responsibility for not getting pregnant from the boyfriend to the girlfriend. Then, legal abortion relieved the impregnating boyfriend of the moral duty of making an honest woman out of his girlfriend.

More speculatively, but also more frighteningly, the revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born.


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Steve Sailer, the author of this article, is a borderline racist.... so take this with a grain of salt.

Outsider, I wasn't going after you. More the person that wrote the column. I'm not saying that's it's false, or true, because abortion is wrong to me period. You all know that. We don't need to go into that discussion again.

B - Do you remember, not too long ago, when there was a leftist out who was reporting this safe logic? He had a book, I can't recall what it was, but in one of the chapters, he proposed the same idea. It was recieved well in the general media, and members of this board. Perhaps we could dig up the last abortion debate, I know it's there. What was amazing, was that during that period a lot of leftists were using this idea, and have in the past used it, to support the argument for abortion.

That's what I was talking about.

I don't remember that, but I did read broken iris' post.

no worries...I didn't feel personally attacked. I can understand the sentiment though when a liberalist paper writes a column about a conservative and abortion. But I understand your point completely.

I personally find it disgusting that anyone would use it as an excuse, but its worse to politicize(as both parties do) choice.

Try digging up that info. That's the reason people jumped on you, you haven't posted any facts to back up your statement.

Levitt has a book, Freakonomics, that contains a distilled version of the paper discussed above. Is that the one you're thinking of?

Please take note that Broken Iris does not agree with Mr. Sailer's conclusions, but is too ignorant on the subject to be able to dismiss them out right.

Though, from a supply and demand perspective, if jobs (economic opportunity) are scarce in urban ghettos then reducing the number of people (through abortion for example) would increase the likelihood of any one individual getting a job and theoretically reduce the probability that person will turn to a life of crime. So it's entirely possible that the idea that increasing black abortion rates would decrease crime by increasing econmic oppurtunity for those black youths who are not vaccuumed out... is valid.

Bill Bennett dug himself into irrelevancy (at least for me) a long time ago, and now the hole's just gotten deeper.

Having heard Levitt speak on this subject on the radio, his other explanation is that every abortion is an "unwanted" preganancy, and unwanted children that are born are more likely to grow up into a life of crime than those that are born wanted, loved, and provided for.

It should be stressed, that Levitt is an economist, and not a sociologist, and therefore presents only cold statistics, and notes correlations. He doesn't attempt to explain the results, except in passing, and he explicitly does not moralize about his findings, and does not encourage others to do so either. When I heard him speak, he noted that his statistics could just as easily be used to show why abortion has harmed society than why it has helped society.

The numbers don't lie. Whether there is any direct correlation between legal abortion and drops in crime rate is not established.

Actually, since men are 10 times more likely to commit crimes than women, it would make more sense to abort male fetuses. Unlike Bennet's idea, this would virtually guarantee a reduced crime rate.

Of course, a few of us (chosen on the basis of genetic aptitude) would be kept around for breeding purposes.

MEIN FUHRER!! I CAN WALK!!

Wouldn't it make more sense to promote safe sex, pump money into the education system (you know, so that inner city schools had enough books so that they could actually learn) revitalize blighted areas so that companies may actually want to locate there. I mean, or you could just abort babies. Whichever.

I like the way this guy lumps everyone together.