Freakonomics and Abortion

Sick at home this morning, I turn on Netflix streaming to pass the time. Not much available, really, but I gave the movie "Freakonomics" a try. Interesting, I guess. Always good to look deeper into the causes of various things. But when the author came up with Roe v. Wade and an increased abortion rate as the cause of a dramatically lower crime rate in the 1990s, I was pretty disgusted. The theory being that less unwanted children would have grown up and been committing crimes in young adulthood in 1990. I know this book is at least five years old, so I'm a little late to this debate. Lifenews.com had a link a couple of years ago to a study which refuted the Freakonomics claim.

Another abortion-related matter came up last week when protesters demanded the removal of a billboard in New York City which used the quote that the most dangerous place in the world for a black person is in the womb due to excessively high abortion rates in the black community. The protesters did not like facing the truth, apparently. Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood founder, believed in a "better world" with eugenics and birth control by reducing the number of undesirable people like, in her mind, black people. See this link originally from a 1992 Citizen magazine article.

I like the billboard but I've got to admit that we conservatives are being a little inconsistent here. The attitude of the billboard is that blacks are the victims, when in fact they are both perpetrators and victims. We conservatives like to believe that all races can raise themselves up with sheer individual effort. The real reason that billboard was offensive to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson is that it put up a mirror for the black people to see what THEY were doing to their own people. They're not victims. They are the active participants in this exercise.