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This just demonstrates how statistics can be manipulated to say
whatever any wishes them to say...
For example, I could say that the rise in personal computer usage in
the 1990s is the reason crime dropped during the same time period...
Or the arrival and use on in-line skates....
Or any other event that just happens to coincide with any other
event...
Just because they coincide does NOT necessarily mean one affects the
other...
June
-------Original Message-------
Date: Thursday, May 17,
2001 09:11:17 AM
Subject: [CTRL]
Abortion-Crime Study is Erroneous (fwd)
-Caveat Lector-
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Statistician Says
Abortion-Crime Study is Erroneous
Source: Fox News; May 16,
2001
New york, NY -- America's dramatic drop in crime during the
1990s has been
attributed to everything from the strong economy and
tougher laws to the
massive increase in the number of prisons. But none
of the reasons
scholars have offered to explain the nation's safer
climate are as
controversial as that proposed by Stanford Law Professor
John Donahue.
In research to be published in this month's Harvard
Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Donahue and a co-researcher claim
legalized abortion may
account for as much as half of the recent crime
reduction.
According to the study, the crime rate in America
dropped 18 years after
the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion,
reducing the number of mothers
who gave birth to unwanted children, and
thus reducing the number of
people alive today who would be in the peak
age group and demographic for
committing crimes.
Donohue said
his study is not pushing a pro-abortion agenda, nor is he
recommending
abortion as a crime deterrent tool. Instead, he said his
study points
out the importance of making sure children are born into
loving and
nurturing environments and preventing unwanted pregnancies.
The
study has elicited strong opposition from pro-life advocates, but
even
some researchers neutral on the issue of abortion say the study
doesn't
hold up under tough scrutiny.
Statistician David Murray
of the Statistical Assessment Service said the
drop in crime rate
correlates with a number of different social and
cultural developments
during the same time period -- everything from the
advent of the
Internet to the demise of disco music. The latter no more
explain the
drop in crime than legalized abortion does, he said.
"They didn't
ask the right question and as soon as you ask the right
question the
effect they think they're seeing disappears and the picture
becomes
much more obscure, much more cloudy," Murray said.
Murray said
young males between the ages of 17 and 25 do commit the
majority of
crimes. If abortion did reduce crime, crime rates would have
dropped
first among young people. They haven't. The number of crimes
committed
by older people dropped first.
"Your trying to identify,
retroactively looking backwards, (if) these
people (would) have been
likely criminals because they fall in social
categories that are also
likely to be aborted," said Murray, who said the
study amounted to
racial profiling.
He said that while the rate of homicide committed
by young men has
dropped, the rate of aggravated assaults among the
young has increased.
And the rate of homicides committed by young
females -- which should have
been equally affected by abortion as males
-- has not dropped.
"They didn't ask the right question, they
looked at all crimes aggregated
together and they looked at all age
groups within a certain frame as to
whether they have committed
crimes," Murray said.
Maryanne Hackett, a spokesperson for Illinois
Right to Life, said the 1.5
million abortions performed in the U.S.
every year span the population
spectrum.
"You're not just losing
a certain group that might be criminals," Hacket
said. "You're losing
people that contribute and are valuable to society,"
she
said.
Hackett said looking to abortion as a solution for the crime
problem would
be like killing prisoners and drug users to solve crime
problems. "We're
substituting one thing for another. We're not really
solving our problems,
we're just killing the people that we think
create the problems," she
said.
--
Roe v. Wade: 28 Years of
Life
Denied
http://www.roevwade.org
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