The Other "Roe Effect"

Posted by: Bill of Right
on April 16, 2005 @ 08:53 AM EST

For a while James Taranto at WSJ has theorized about something he dubbed the “Roe effect” which says, in sum, that “abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be.” He explains:

First…liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions. Second…children's political views tend to reflect those of their parents--not exactly, of course, and not in every case, but on average. Thus abortion depletes the next generation of liberals and eventually makes the population more conservative. We call this the Roe effect, after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. MORE

(A statistical look is here.)

A similar theory that, until recently, seems to have seen less attention deals with the possible connection between legalized abortion and falling crime rates. U. Chicago statistics wonk Steven D. Levitt advanced such a theory years ago, and John Tierney explores it a bit today for the New York Times. Thanks to Roe, the theory goes, “a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been at greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990's.” (Levitt is the author of a new book, Freakonomics, which explains the statistics behind issues for which most of us wouldn’t look to statistics for an explanation.)

All of this seems to be getting the attention of the pro-choice movement. For one thing, it seems likely that if the Roe effect and Levitt’s falling crime theory are valid, the pro-choice movement may suffer, too. According to Newsweek, “Last fall UCLA found that 55 percent of freshmen at more than 400 schools said abortion should be legal, down from 64 percent a decade earlier. In a February NEWSWEEK GENext Poll, only 3 percent of those 18 to 29 called abortion the most important issue America faces.”

There’s a coldness to statistics when they’re used to inform on social issues like abortion and crime, and ironies abound when one imagines abortion has positive political effects for Republicans, a large number of whom believe abortion is murder, period. As one of those people the hard truth is, when I consider the number of abortions that have taken place since Roe, I am sickened - the political benefits aren't worth a damn to me, considering the cost - and I suspect I'm not alone. With this in mind there something a little too gleeful and cute about Taranto when he explains his theory, and a tone that imply it involves field mice or snaildarters, rather than a human life.

A liberal friend of mine read about Taranto's theory recently and shook his head, snickering at me and the Roe effect theory, as though the "whole idea" were so ridiculous that the explanation - statistics - didn't even warrant a look. As Tierney notes, though, “the ideas that make us comfortable are the ones to beware.”

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