Would you support abortion purely as a means of population control or crime reduction?

[Senator Incitatus]

As you might know, the landmark Roe v. Wade decision was made against a background of disparate state laws (and overturning Roe would likely return to that as the status quo). What you might not know, however, is that before Roe, liberalization efforts were underway in a number of states and at the federal level.

In 1971, Richard Nixon became the first presidential candidate to get involved in these legislative debates when he explicitly rejected the report of John Rockefeller's Commission on Population and the American Future. In 1972, he also angered another John's brother Nelson, the Governor of New York, by announcing his opposition to New York's proposed liberalization measure, which would have permitted abortion through the 24th week of pregnancy.

Both Rockefellers advanced their support for abortion on the same ground — national and global population growth was out of control and crime rates were sky high. Abortion would slow or halt that growth and would be used primarily by married mothers who had more children than they needed, wanted, or perhaps were permitted to have. Additionally, reducing abortion would reduce crime rates and the need for welfare. They cited a 1939–41 study in Gothenburg, Sweden that showed the unwanted children of mothers seeking abortions were more likely to grow up in poverty, engage in criminal or anti-social behaviors, and be a drain on public assistance.

An sample of letters to the editor from that month follows:

"Within the anti-natalist camp itself there is a shift going on. In the old Margaret Sanger days the argument for birth control used to be that too many children... were hell for the family... But now the argument is that too many people are hell for the society, because of crowding, pollution, and the using up of resources... The old emphasis was on the right not to breed unless you chose to. The new emphasis is on the duty to breed less.

"President Nixon's recently expressed opposition... discourages me profoundly. When he says that abortion should not be used for population control he is, in a sense, telling us that we should not have population control. Ruling out abortions would rule out the hopes for a strong program of population limitation and for intelligent birth control in general."

"In 1971 mankind increased at a rate of 2.5 persons per second; very little time remains to achieve a balance between man's numbers and his resources and food supply... [Nixon] is not willing to take a stand on the need for population stability. God grant that the American people have more wisdom than their President!"

"The time has come for responsible people in our society to recognize that population control has become the crucial issue facing mankind in the 20th century, an issue demanding articulate support and decisive action, not timid avoidance."

In reference to an op-ed asking 'How many is [children] is. enough?': "Just on the slim chance that [the op-ed writer] was really on the level, let me try to answer his concluding question... in the international language of elementary arithmetic, and a satisfactory answer is 'no more than two offspring per couple.'"

These arguments are rarer today, but still bounce around. In his 2005 book Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell (with co-author Steven Levitt) famously advances the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis that, similar to the Gothenburg study, increased rates of violent crime in Romania under the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime could be attributed to the country's strict abortion laws. And though the bulk of abortion defense is done by groups like NARAL and the ACLU, remnant groups still exist that promote abortion as a means of population control, like Floridians for a Sustainable Population.

Recently departed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a young lawyer, also attributed the Court's Roe v. Wade decision to public outcry over population control at the time. She later reflected on her 1973 thinking in 2009, saying:

"At the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. [I thought at the time] that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion, which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae [v. Harris], the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong."

With the growing possibility that Roe will be overturned and abortion returned to the legislative arena, these policy questions are worth discussing again. So — as distinct from the rights arguments typical of most Roe-to-present abortion arguments — would you support abortion as a means of population control, crime and welfare reduction, both, or neither?

[afleitch]

It's a bit of a disingenuous question.

Abortion should not be a matter of state polity concerning population/crime/welfare any more than banning abortion or severely restricting it should be to 'boost the birthrate' , 'provide native labour' or be a mark of national morality or character as some states have done in the not so recent past.

I support abortion purely as the personal or family orientated choice of the person who is pregnant. I have no concern for any prevailing zeitgeist.

[RINO Tom]

It's a bit of a disingenuous question.

Abortion should not be a matter of state polity concerning population/crime/welfare any more than banning abortion or severely restricting it should be to 'boost the birthrate' , 'provide native labour' or be a mark of national morality or character as some states have done in the not so recent past.

I support abortion purely as the personal or family orientated choice of the person who is pregnant. I have no concern for any prevailing zeitgeist.

I largely agree with this as a matter of end policy, but my moral sentiments definitely lie with abortions being objectively unfortunate things that society should CERTAINLY not promote.  In other words, I support each individual woman being able to make that tough decision herself (with some exceptions ... getting an abortion 24 hours before you're due is hardly different than killing the baby once he or she is born, IMO), but I am deeply disturbed by people who are so adamantly pro-choice that they have come to see abortion as anything less than sad, even when necessary.

[Senator Incitatus]

It's a bit of a disingenuous question.

Abortion should not be a matter of state polity concerning population/crime/welfare any more than banning abortion or severely restricting it should be to 'boost the birthrate' , 'provide native labour' or be a mark of national morality or character as some states have done in the not so recent past.

I support abortion purely as the personal or family orientated choice of the person who is pregnant. I have no concern for any prevailing zeitgeist.

You could have just said "no." It wasn't a disingenuous question at all.

[parochial boy]

If I'm remembering correctly, a large part of the Freakonomics argument fell apart when you consider that crime didn't fall just in the USA during the period in question, but across the developed world, including countries that already had both more liberal or stricter rules on abortion or that hadn't actually changed them at that point.

Also, a big problem is that it is a policy that doesn't actually do anything to address the conditions that lead to crime, you know, poverty, social, familiar and economic disfunction and so on. All you're doing is assuming if that you magically remove X population from society then you will solve Y problem that X population is responsible for. Meanwhile, unless you actually change the way your society is organised then you're going to have a lot of people winding up in that situation anyway.

[afleitch]

It's a bit of a disingenuous question.

Abortion should not be a matter of state polity concerning population/crime/welfare any more than banning abortion or severely restricting it should be to 'boost the birthrate' , 'provide native labour' or be a mark of national morality or character as some states have done in the not so recent past.

I support abortion purely as the personal or family orientated choice of the person who is pregnant. I have no concern for any prevailing zeitgeist.

You could have just said "no." It wasn't a disingenuous question at all.

It was, I think by accident rather than design. You've asked about abortion as a 'tool' of wider societal and state actions implying alien (to today's observer) notions to the legal and moral arguments of post-war America that led to Roe and I've simply highlighted that there are historic reasons why states did not allow abortion or even basic family planning for cornocopian rather than malthusian reasons, for nativism, for expansionism etc. All of which fall under the umbrella of state control over the choices women and transmen are afforded.

It would be just as disingenuous to say 'would you oppose abortion purely as a means of population control'; it makes the actual choices faced today by countless individuals theoretical, which you don't have to do.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thinking of abortion as "a means of population control or crime reduction" actually makes me support it even less, and I suspect I'm not unusual in this.

Fortunately, afleitch is right that these lines of thought are now largely alien to the pro-choice side of The Abortion Debate. The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom. I think we're all the better for that.

[John Dule]

I already do.

[HillGoose]

no, that's authoritarian garbage. overpopulation is a lie, we need increasing population. crime reduction? who cares. if everyone carried a gun there would be no crime.

[AGA]

no, that's authoritarian garbage. overpopulation is a lie, we need increasing population. crime reduction? who cares. if everyone carried a gun there would be no crime.

Allowing abortion is the authoritarian stance?

[HillGoose]

no, that's authoritarian garbage. overpopulation is a lie, we need increasing population. crime reduction? who cares. if everyone carried a gun there would be no crime.

Allowing abortion is the authoritarian stance?

no, thinking abortion should be done for "population control" and "crime rates" is the authoritarian stance. i think it should be legal but shouldn't be encouraged or discouraged by the gov either, especially not with some goal in mind of like, reducing the population or reducing crime.

u guys know in order to beat China, Russia, and Iran's asses in the 21st century we r gonna need a big ass population. so i think the idea of reducing our population is pretty wack ngl. that's just my opinion tho i don't think it should be enforced on anybody.

[Kingpoleon]

No. As a religious person who believes that our lives have value beyond mere numbers, I do not support robotic policies that treat society as a machine. This would treat people as cogs and gears that should be removed or added to make the machine “work better,” and it fundamentally denies the very value that each of us has.

[PSOL]

How much straw you pulling?

[Ferguson97]

No? I mean overpopulation is a myth and crime reduction is an obvious benefit, but I'm not particularly concerned with why a woman would want to get an abortion - I just want her to be able to get one.

So while I don't support it specifically because of those reasons, I would also not oppose it because of those reasons.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Trying to think of how to put this...

(1) It would not be strange to find birthrates (among other socioeconomic development statistics) as a control in cross-national studies of homicide rates.
(2) it was only within the past two weeks that I found myself trapped in a conversation where two fairly well-educated people discussed the (purported) role of abortion in crime rates.
(3) In discussions of other policies, we find that people very often stake arguments based on the potential effects of policies rather than a priori moral assumptions as to whether such a thing is correct to do.

So I don't really see the question in this thread as disingenuous, though perhaps dated in some ways (interior monologue: "wasn't politics so much more interesting then!?"). That said, I've always found this line of argument, when advanced, to be particularly odious. It certainly creates the impression of an elite-led attempt to weed out undesirable/"deviant" citizens and/or avoid population pressures that would spur further demands for redistribution. I call it the Prescott Bush school of public policy.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom.

I'm curious about this. Without making me wade through Google search results, could you explain how they organically wove that into the show? 

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom.

I'm curious about this. Without making me wade through Google search results, could you explain how they organically wove that into the show? 

One of the characters, an unlucky Flannery O'Connor protagonist who fell through a wormhole into a less sympathetic narrative abortion clinic shooter with a broad Appalachian accent, turned out to have had several abortions herself in the past and there's a scene that's set on Mothers' Day where she's grieving them. Then another character "consoles" her with the Freakonomics talking point and, mirabile dictu, it actually makes her feel better because Orange is the New Black was a show about poor criminals produced and scripted by PMC goody-two-shoes.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom.

I'm curious about this. Without making me wade through Google search results, could you explain how they organically wove that into the show? 

One of the characters, an unlucky Flannery O'Connor protagonist who fell through a wormhole into a less sympathetic narrative abortion clinic shooter with a broad Appalachian accent, turned out to have had several abortions herself in the past and there's a scene that's set on Mothers' Day where she's grieving them. Then another character "consoles" her with the Freakonomics talking point and, mirabile dictu, it actually makes her feel better because Orange is the New Black was a show about poor criminals produced and scripted by PMC goody-two-shoes.

Oof.

[Ferguson97]

The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom. I think we're all the better for that.

Yeah, it's one of things that's true but I understand why it makes people feel icky. 

"Someone who would have been an unwanted child would be more likely to grow up in a negative home environment and be predisposed to commit crimes" sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface, but tying it directly to abortion is understandably going to give people pause.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Freakonomics thing showed up in Orange is the New Black at one point and got massive pushback from the show's fans, and that was a show with a very socially liberal fandom. I think we're all the better for that.

Yeah, it's one of things that's true but I understand why it makes people feel icky. 

"Someone who would have been an unwanted child would be more likely to grow up in a negative home environment and be predisposed to commit crimes" sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface, but tying it directly to abortion is understandably going to give people pause.

It's less about whether or not it's true and more about whether or not it's appropriate to bring into a deeply personal event like the decision to end a pregnancy. I don't think I know anybody whose actual, brass-tacks decision on whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term would be at all influenced by the crime rate, and very few people whose decision would be influenced by population politics. Of course there are plenty of people who decide this on the basis of their own self-perceived ability to give a child a safe and supportive home, but that's obviously not the same thing.

[Alben Barkley]

It's a bit of a disingenuous question.

Abortion should not be a matter of state polity concerning population/crime/welfare any more than banning abortion or severely restricting it should be to 'boost the birthrate' , 'provide native labour' or be a mark of national morality or character as some states have done in the not so recent past.

I support abortion purely as the personal or family orientated choice of the person who is pregnant. I have no concern for any prevailing zeitgeist.

For all their disingenuous talk about “individual liberties,” conservatives just don’t seem to get this. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen one approach abortion from some sort of perspective related to population control or what’s good for the nation as a collective. They genuinely just do not seem to get that we sincerely believe a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body, period. It is that simple. It is an actual matter of individual rights and free choice, and of course conservatives oppose that because they want to force their own ideas of morality on the collective. True “individualists!”

[Person Man]

Yes. You can be pro-abortion without being pro-choice and anti-abortion without being pro-life.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Yes. You can be pro-abortion without being pro-choice and anti-abortion without being pro-life.

I guess I have already heard the latter, but what the heck does the former mean?

[KaiserDave]

Yes. You can be pro-abortion without being pro-choice and anti-abortion without being pro-life.

I guess I have already heard the latter, but what the heck does the former mean?

Coerced abortions?

[Kingpoleon]

For all their disingenuous talk about “individual liberties,” conservatives just don’t seem to get this. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen one approach abortion from some sort of perspective related to population control or what’s good for the nation as a collective. They genuinely just do not seem to get that we sincerely believe a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body, period. It is that simple. It is an actual matter of individual rights and free choice, and of course conservatives oppose that because they want to force their own ideas of morality on the collective. True “individualists!”

I have met very few people who think that the law should not be based upon their own moral standard, at least to some degree. This disingenuous socially liberal talking point really means that we shouldn’t base laws on a bad sense of morals. It’s a very circular argument that makes, “The Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it!” sound like a logical argument.