Em 2005, dois economistas escreveram um livro - Freakonomics - no qual utilizam a metodologia e as técnicas da ciência económica para explicar variadas situações do dia-a-dia e, simultaneamente, para ilustrar determinados conceitos económicos.
Este livro rapidamente se tornou um best-seller e gerou uma série de outros livros do mesmo género.
Num dos capítulos do livro, os autores defendem que a legalização do aborto nos EUA contribuiu para a redução do crime (ou, mais concretamente, do número de criminosos). Esta tese rapidamente se tornou uma verdade absoluta e é, por vezes, utilizada pelos partidários da liberalização do aborto.
Acontece que os autores de Freakonomics se enganaram nas contas e as conclusões que apresentam sobre esta questão estão erradas.
Os erros de Freakonomics sobre os efeitos do aborto foram tratados, nomeadamente, no The Economist (Oops-onomics, Dec 1st 2005) e no Wall Street Journal ('Freakonomics' Abortion Research Is Faulted by a Pair of Economists, November 28, 2005).
No entanto, a melhor e mais completa refutação dos argumentos dos Freakonomists foi publicada por Ramesh Ponnuru em The Party of Death (Regnery, 2006, pp. 66-72):
"CAUTION! THE FETUS YOU SAVE WILL GROW UP TO MUG YOU!"
In 1999, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford law professor John Donohue wrote a paper arguing that abortion cuts crime. The legalization of abortion in the 1970s, they said, accounts for as much as half of the reduction in crime in the 1990s. Crime fell because criminals had been imprisoned, sure, but also because many had never been born.
When their paper was publicized that year, there were pro-lifers and pro-choicers who accused them of racism. But by 2005, their thesis seemed to have become uncontroversial in the mainstream media.
The most-hyped portion of Freakonomics, a 2005 bestseller that Levitt wrote with journalist Steven Dubner, is devoted to the abortion-cuts-crime theory'. The book presents Levitt as a "fearless," unconventional "rogue economist." 4 Yet he does not appear to have paid any substantial price for violating some alleged taboo against truth-telling. He has merely had to bask fearlessly in the media's praise. Reviewers in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal accepted Levitt's theory without a word of criticism.' (The Journal's reviewer wrote, "Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae." What could he more delightful than proof that abortion mows down the criminal class?) Forbes called the theory "entirely convincing," and The Economist claimed the hook "moved methodically and persuasively through the statistical evidence" for it.6 The New York Times stands out for having run three positive articles on the book. Some of them were gushing, and none of them questioned the abortion theory.'
Perhaps this uncritical reception reflected the surface plausibility of the theory. As Levitt and Dubner summarize it: "Legalized abortion led to less unwontedness; unwontedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime." They draw on another study to argue that "the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion" would have been more likely than most children to be poor and to grow up with one parent—and thus to be criminals. "In other words, the very factors that drove millions of women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives."
It should he noted that all references to race in the 1999 paper have been studiously scrubbed from the hook version of Levitt's argument. Levitt and Dubner are very careful not to say that the unborn children were disproportionately black, that blacks account for a disproportionate amount of crime, and that abortion therefore reduced crime by reducing the black population. Had this point been made explicit, the reviews might not have been quite so glowing.
If the abortion-cuts-crime theory is true, then its truth should be faced and its implications pondered. If it is true, then Levitt, Donohue, and Dubner deserve credit for advancing our understanding of some complicated social phenomena.
But is it true? For a long time, the only people who challenged it were a few researchers (notably Baruch College economist Ted Joyce) whose papers received rather less attention than Levitt's, and the journalist-blogger Steve Sailer. It is these critics, however unheralded, who appear to have the stronger case.
The most impressive evidence for the Levitt theory is that the states that legalized abortion a few years before Roe saw their crimes rates drop a few years earlier than the rest of the country. What Freakonomics ignores, however, is that crime had risen earlier in those same states. As Sailer writes, "[T]he two big urban areas that were the first to enjoy the purported crime-fighting benefits of legalized abortion in 1970, New York City and Los Angeles, were also the ground zeroes of the teen murder rampage that began, perhaps not coincidentally, about 16 years later."[1] (Levitt also ignores the facts that people move from state to state and that they cross state lines to get abortions, weakening the value of his correlations.)
If Levitt's theory were correct, one would expect murder rates to have dropped among younger teens before it dropped among older teens. The fourteen-year-olds of 1993 should have been more law-abiding than the fourteen-year-olds of 1983, since legalized abortion would have, supposedly, snuffed out man- criminals in the later group. There should have been a much smaller drop in crime among the twenty-five-year-olds, all of whom in both years had been born before Roe.
As Sailer notes, this is the reverse of what happened. Between 1983 and 1993, murder rates went down among people older than twenty-five and went up among those younger. "[T]he first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history." The murder rate among the over-twenty-five set started falling in 1981. It started to go back up only when the set started including people born after Roe[2].
Joyce notes that Levitt's theory also implies that crime should have fallen more among blacks than whites—since blacks would have reaped more of the supposed crime-fighting benefits of abortion. Didn't happen[3].
In the fall of 2005, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, an economist and researcher, broke through the media's wall of protection around Freakonomics with a study pointing out that some of Levitt's key evidence was based on a programming error and a faulty choice of statistics. Once those errors are corrected, that evidence "vanishes."[4]
The theory seems plausible to many people because of a common mistake. People naturally assume that if abortion had been prohibited (and the prohibition perfectly enforced) in America, the forty-five million unborn children aborted would have instead been born. But that is not the case. One effect of legalized abortion was to increase the rate of careless conceptions. Its availability made it easier for people to have casual sex and to dispense with contraceptives. Abortion is almost always "birth control" in the sense that it aims at preventing birth. The high repeat abortion rate—44 percent of abortions today are repeat abortions; 18 percent of abortions are performed on women who have already had two—suggests that it is sometimes the birth control of first resort[5].
Further evidence of the effects of liberal abortion laws on sexual behavior comes from researchers Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann. They have estimated that the legalization of abortion increased rates of syphilis and gonorrhea—accounting for a quarter of the incidence of these diseases.'[6] Freakonomics got this much right: The legalization of abortion caused the number of conceptions to go up by 30 percent, while causing the number of births to go down by only 6 percent[7].
Many of the unborn children who have been aborted since Roe, in other words, would never have been conceived in the first place without it. Every once in a while you will hear a pro-lifer arguing that without Roe and legal abortion, America would benefit from having forty-five million more workers and taxpayers. Whatever else may be said about this argument, it fails to reckon with abortion's full range of effects.
So Roe stimulated a lot of conceptions and a larger number of abortions. The next thing to remember is that it stands to reason that some of those extra conceptions made it through to birth. Some kids, paradoxically, would not have been born if not for legal abortion. Our intuitions guide us astray here: We cannot simply assume that abortion reduces the number of kids born in circumstances that are conducive to a life of crime.
We cannot even assume that abortion reduces the number of illegitimate kids. Many people, again, make an intuitive link: They think that because most pregnant single women face a choice between abortion and single motherhood, society therefore faces the same choice at the macro level. But that's not necessarily so.
In 1996, two liberal social scientists wrote a paper noting that the availability of abortion and contraception had raised out-of-wedlock birth rates:
Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception found themselves pressured to participate in pre-marital sexual relations without being able to exact a promise of marriage in case of pregnancy. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.
Advances in reproductive technology eroded the custom of shotgun marriage in another way. Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. "If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception," the man can reason, "why should I sacrifice myself to get married?" By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.
Many men have changed their attitudes regarding the respon¬sibility for uplanned pregnancies. As one contributor to the Inter-net wrote recently to the Dads' Rights Newsgroup, "Since the decision to have the child is solely up to the mother, I don't see how both parents have responsibility to that child." That attitude, of course, makes it far less likely that the man will offer marriage as a solution to a couple's pregnancy quandary[8].
Abortion may not lead to fewer unwanted children; it may lead to the birth of more children who aren't wanted by their fathers. While this result may sound counterintuitive—and some research supports the opposite view[9]—it is worth noting that abortion and illegitimacy rates rose in tandem during the 1970s and have fallen in tandem since the 1990s.
The trends on infanticide are one place to look to check the thesis that abortion reduced "unwantedness." But the infanticide rate increased steadily during the three decades after 1970—from a rate of 4.3 per 100,000 infants to a rate of 9.2. "Infanticide fell dramatically" because abortion was legalized, claims Freakonomics. It cites one study. Here's what the abstract of that study says: "The legalization of abortion was not associated with a sudden change in child homicide trends. It was, however, associated with a steady decrease in the homicides of toddlers (i.e., one- to four-year-olds) in subsequent years. Although in the predicted direction, the decrease in homicides of children under 1 year of age was not statistically significant."[10]
Joyce has said that the drop in crime that Levitt attributes to abortion has much more to do with the end of the crack wars's[11]. The crack wars caused a massive increase in murder starting in the mid-1980s, and then petered out in the mid-1990s. That raises the question of what effect abortion had on the crack wars. The truth is that we have no idea. Levitt assumes that abortion had nothing to do with its beginning but everything to do with its end[12].
In what may be the strangest passage of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner invoke the example of Romania. The Communist regime banned abortion in 1966 on the ground that the fetus was the collective property of the nation. The result, according to our freakonomists, was an increase in crime and, eventually—they leave the chain of causation obscure, perhaps out of necessity—the violent end of the regime. Communist Romania may not make for good analogies with the U.S. for a variety of reasons. One stands out: The ban led to a 100 percent increase in Romanian fertility rates. American fertility rates, remember, dropped only 6 percent when abortion was legalized here. The magnitudes aren't remotely similar[13].
Even if Levitt were right that abortion cuts crime, what would follow from this conclusion? Levitt and Dubner note that their theory implies that it takes hundreds of abortions to reduce the homicide total by one[14].21 As a crime-control strategy, abortion is "terribly inefficient."
Even if it were more "efficient," it would raise obvious moral objections. Let's say that we could apply a kind of prenatal profiling to figure out which unborn children were the most likely to grow up to become criminals. Would we be justified in eliminating them for that reason? What if we could pinpoint with complete accuracy which five-year-olds were budding criminals? Obviously we would not think it permissible to eliminate them. Whether it is morally permissible to eliminate unborn children is what the abortion debate is about. Anyone who thinks abortion should be tolerated as a way of reducing crime probably already favors tolerating abortion for other reasons. People who think that abortion should itself be considered a crime will not be swayed.
Pro-lifers thus need not fear that their case will be weakened should research ever prove that abortion really does reduce crime. At present, the balance of evidence suggests that- it does not. The eagerness with which many people greeted claims that it does shows how much some people want to find social benefits from abortion and its legalization.
Chief among those alleged benefits has been a reduction in the number of "unwanted children." The argument that abortion reduces illegitimacy is a sub-species of that claim, and the argument that it reduces crime is a corollary of it.
[1] Steve Sailer, "Pre-Emptive Executions?" The American Conservative, May 9, 2005. See also his follow-up comments at www.isteve.com/abortion.htm.
[2] See also John Lott and John Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births," Yale Law School Program for Law, Economics and Public Policy Working Paper # 254, 2001.
[3] Ted Joyce, "Further Tests of Abortion and Crime", National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 10564, 2004.
[4] Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, "Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data," Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Working Paper 05-15. This research led The Economist, to its credit, to take a more skeptical look at the Freakonomics theory. "Oopsonornics," Dec. 1, 2005.
[5] Laurie Elam-Evans et al, "Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2002," Centers for Disease Control, Table 13. (I'rn assuming, conservatively, that where the number of abortions a woman has had is unknown, she has had only one.)
[6] Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann, "The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Sexual Behavior: Evidence from Sexually Transmit ted Diseases," Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 32 (June 2003).
[7] Freakonomics, p. 139
[8] George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States," Brookings Policy Brief #5, 1996 (www.brook.edulcomm/policybriefs/pb05.htm ). It is based on a paper by Akerlof, Yellen, and Michael Katz with the same title, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that year.
[9] For a review of the literature, see Jonathan Klick, "Econometric Analyses of U.S. Abortion Policy: A Critical Review," Fordham Urban Law Journal, vol. 31 (2004).
[10] Information in this paragraph comes from Sailer's website.
[11] Sharon Cohen, "Freakonomics in Chicago," Northwest Indiana Times, May 6, 2005.
[12] See http://www.isteve.comlabortion.htm/
[13] Joyce, op. cit.
[14] Freakonomics, pp. 142-44.
1 comentário:
podia traduzir né?
Enviar um comentário