Law-abiding friends and acquaintances who had abortions back in the late 1970s and early 1980s would probably not have made that lamentable choice if abortion was illegal, I've often thought.
Economist John R. Lott, Jr., offers evidence that my instincts about legality creating an abortion-friendly culture among the unlikely were on the mark in his new book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't.
Here is Lott's explanation :
"Remember the fundamental principle of economics: if something becomes more costly, people do less of it. If abortion is illegal, the 'cost' of sex is relatively high due to the possibility of pregnancy. No method of birth control is 100 percent effective, and without the option to have an abortion as a last-ditch safeguard, having sex carries a risk. When contemplating having premarital sex, women know that they might have to bear and raise a child, possibly on their own. Likewise, men know that they might end up having to support a child, and both know that having a baby could create pressures on them to marry even if they don't want to do so. Consequently, both men and women tend to be more reluctant to engage in casual sex, especially unprotected sex, when abortion is illegal."
It's comforting to have common sense supported by the research of an academic like Lott who has a gift for clarifying complex subjects, including economics, human nature and even abortion.
Pro-lifers, please take note.
(c) 2007 Marybeth T. Hagan
Cross-posting with http://www.mothermayibeborn.com
>>It's comforting to have common sense supported by the research of an academic like Lott who has a gift for clarifying complex subjects, including economics, human nature and even abortion.
Marybeth,
Many pro-lifers would be surprised to find out just how much supporting research there is out there.
I've been working on a particular project for almost a year now (one that I won't talk about yet), and I've come across quite a bit of economic, psychological, and sociological research that would interest you and many others.
Send me a reply and I'll e-mail you some more details...
Ruben
Praise God for a logical rebuttal of the lies in Freakonomics!!
Nice summary of the impact of supply and demand on our behavior. When sex is cheap people will do it more. When it is expensive people will do it less.
We did an extensive debunking of Steven Levitt's Freakonomics book on our pro-life blog two years ago, the most pertinent piece being this one, http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2005/10/crime-abortion-this-is-second-of-five.html (see excerpt at bottom of comment). Levitt's theory wasn't even his own, he got it from another economist!
However, in the course of conducting that research, I learned that John Lott erred in one aspect of his work (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8884-2003Jan31 ). I subsequently felt uncomfortable about quoting his findings in the crime/abortion debate which further debunked Levitt's theory (Lott's paper on that is found here, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=270126 )
Our excerpt:
These two later again published virtually the same paper in 2001 in Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics, completely altering the name to "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime."
This last time, however, Levitt and Donohue purged their earlier volatile references to "selective-abortion" being one possible way that crime is reduced due to women "most at risk to give birth to children who would engage in criminal activity"--including "African-Americans"--having more abortions. They changed the latter phrase to the more PC "economically disadvantaged."
What Levitt and/or Donohue said--twice in 1998 and once in 1991--was this: "...African-Americans are...substantially more likely to seek abortions...Recent studies have found children born to these [African-American, teenaged and/or unmarried] mothers to be at higher risk for committing crime in adolescence."
(Translated, what they said was this: "Studies show that African-American babies not otherwise aborted are more likely to commit crime as teens, so aborting them will bring crime down.")