Abortion and Crime

Steve Sailer has an interesting and comprehensive article answering University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt's argument, from his new book Freakonomics, that legalizing abortion cut crime in the United States. In addition to its controversial political and social implications, this is a fascinating question about causality. Sailer writes,

"[T]he acid test of Levitt's theory is this: Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization?

"Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history."

Sailer writes from an openly anti-abortion point of view, but as in all of his writing, he pursues the statistics wherever they lead.

Read it here.