Comments on: Abortion and Wantedness

By: J. Goard

J. Goard — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:39:29 +0000

Julian,

Your penultimate sentence strikes me as a massive understatement. Women without educational prospects or high standards of personal success have a massive positive incentive to become single mothers. It’s easy to underestimate the extent to which one can neglect children and still function in the lower-middle-class world. In my hometown, that extra check gives many young adults essentially endless spending money compared with their childless peers.

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:03:55 +0000

It probably just comes down to Steve being a Bell Curvist racist, who sees abortion as striking at the core of the white race – excuse me, White Race. The actual arguments are irrelevant.

By: Glen

Glen — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 05:14:45 +0000

Julian — your argument indicates that legal abortions will lead to more abortions of non-future-criminals than abortions of future-criminals. But even so, as long as there are more abortions of future-criminals than there would have been without legal abortion, Levitt’s hypothesis would not require modification.

By: Wilson

Wilson — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:03:50 +0000

I recall reading Mr. Sailer’s yelling in the comments section of that blog earlier, and I thought he was fairly vocal as to why he thought that Levitt’s hypothesis was wrong.

He thinks that legal abortion effectively lowers the crime and stigma associated with unprotected sex, and therefore raises the number of children born into bad situations in this country.

I thought this was his argument, which strikes me as odd for a few reasons; one being because it implies people are having more sex thanks to the promise that abortion will save them from having to raise children, but then don’t get an abortion anywhere.

I don’t really know enough about this argument to weigh in with more sense than just to repeat what I thought I read somewhere.