Hello and welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. The Eric Erickson show. The phone number is 877-977-9-7-425. I want to address something real quick. I've got to move on to other stuff. But we've gotten a couple of phone calls about this during commercial break. and I also see emails coming in from people who are conservative libertarian-ish people who say that,

what about the Freakonomics argument here?

Essentially, Stephen Levitt wrote a book called Freakonomics.

He's a data researcher and statistician and economist and he argued that the crime

rate went down in the country after Roe v. Wade and basically did a causation instead of

correlation thing. And what he argued is that unwanted children, now you've got to do a couple of jumps here. Unwanted children are more likely to be

the troublemakers. The troublemakers are more likely to cause crime and the crime rate is to go up.

Unwanted children who can be aborted, therefore are not troubled children who cause crime.

Therefore abortion reduces the crime rate.

First of all, it's appalling that you can take a person and reduce them to a statistic and say, well, let's eliminate them.

But more than that, it's actually been fairly debunked, including by the Federal Reserve,

that Stephen

Levitt missed some data points in there, but also reality itself sets in.

We have higher crime now than we did in the 1990s, and we have a lower birth rate overall, but not through abortion.

So though we have fewer children around who are unwanted, not because people are aborting,

but because people simply aren't having sex, we have higher crime now than we had then.

So how do we have less unwanted kids now in higher crime than we had than Levitt proposed in his argument?

Makes you wonder.

Maybe he missed some things.

But I actually, honestly, I have a moral philosophical objection to people who cite the freakonomic argument. You are taking humanity out of the equation. And you say that, well, crime will go down and these kids, I mean, they're just going to be troublemakers, so might as well kill them. I mean, that's your argument. You don't like to put it that way, but that's your argument is, let's just kill them because they're unloved, unwanted. They're going to be troublemakers.

What about the kid who was aborted who would have grown up to cure cancer?

What about the kid who was aborted who would have grown up to be a hero in the next war?

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