Abortion Dust-Up

John Derbyshire takes a whack at Ramesh Ponnuru's book Party of Death. Ramesh responds. Separately, John O'Sullivan reviews the book.

By the way, pp. 65-73 of Ramesh's book includes the most lucid summary of my critique of the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory I've read (including my own stuff). Here's a small sample:

If the abortion-cuts-crime theory is true, then its truth should be faced and its implications pondered. If it is true, then Levitt, Donohue, and Dubner deserve credit for advancing our understanding of some complicated social phenomena.

But is it true? For a long time, the only people who challenged it were a few researchers (notably Baruch College economist Ted Joyce) whose papers received rather less attention than Levitt's, and the journalist-blogger Steve Sailer. It is these critics, however unheralded, who appear to have the stronger case.

The most impressive evidence for the Levitt theory is that the states that legalized abortion a few years before Roe saw their crimes rates drop a few years earlier than the rest of the country. What Freakonomics ignores, however, is that crime had risen earlier in those same state. As Sailer writes, "[T]he two big urban areas that were the first to enjoy the purported crime-fighting benefits of legalized abortion in 1970, New York City and Los Angeles, were also the ground zeros of the teen murder rampage that began, perhaps not coincidentally, about 16 years later."

I'll see if Ramesh will let me post the whole thing. Ideally, though, some magazine would print those pages of his as a stand-alone article.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer