Pre-emptive executions?, 4/1/11, Blog post #10

Kyerre Hawkins 4/1/11 5:15pm Would you consider abortion a crime? Some people would and others wouldn’t. There are many reasons for both views. In the article I chose for this week it discusses how some economist feel as though abortion reduces crimes and criminals if it was legalized. Steven D. Levitt, an economist from the University of Chicago, believes that abortion is the reason for the decline in crime rates. This view was proposed in 1999, which of course is a decade ago but the question is this theory true and what are the crime rates in relation to abortion across the global lately? The article goes on to state statistics of murder rates in 1981 of adults age 25 and older. Statistics show that there was a decline during this year of crime rates which was also during the time that abortion was very common and easily accessible. One resource that was discussed in the article was the book “Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This book talked about the “benefits” of abortion for society. As I mentioned earlier, the book discussed that abortion was easily available which reduced the growth of supposed-criminals to harm other people or commit crimes in general. In another article that talked about this novel, thinks that this theory was basically saying that the “unwanted” children turn into criminals because of the stress on the parent of their arrival to the world. I am not sure I agree with this statement or the theory that abortion is a good method for crime reduction. The statistics seem reliable but I don’t think abortion is the main reason why crime rates have reduced but I understand how economist would try to tie the two together. I feel more research should be done to see what else could contribute to the reduction of crimes. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-03-18-drowning-by-numbers/ http://amconmag.com/article/2005/may/09/00021/