The bigotry of low expectations

In 1921, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Her theory was that you could predict a child’s outcome by looking at the parents. Her solution to this cycle of poverty and ignorance? “Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence.”

In 2005, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, trying to make a point against abortion, argued “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” adding “that would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.” In response, writers such as William Saletan of Slate magazine castigated Bennett for “a bigotry” of “low expectations,” asking “Is it morally acceptable to predict the criminal propensity of unborn children based on the color of their skin?” and answering a resounding “NO.”

The movie “Minority Report” depicts a society with mutants who can see the future. Their ability is used to detect crimes before they are committed — at which point the “perpetrators” are arrested, charged and sentenced for those crimes. The movie raised the ethical question — can people be punished for what they are expected to do?

Of course, Bennett was not talking about punishment. He was trying to illustrate why you shouldn’t try to justify or oppose abortion based on perceived impacts to society and picked an outrageous example of “benefit” to show the absurdity of doing so. But in doing so, he implied that people could not be expected to overcome their circumstance, that in fact you could accurately forecast their future.

Of course it would be reprehensible to justify abortion by citing lower crime rates — or to suggest that you know aborting certain babies would decrease anti-social behavior. But such a suggestion was made by Steve Levitt, in his book “Freakonomics,” where he argued based on statistical analysis that abortion was the reason for the drop in the crime rate after 1994.

Levitt’s work was cited by Gary Jacobsen in Tuesday’s column “The crime rate is falling. Why?” He quotes Levitt’s conclusion that “Poor, unmarried and teenage mothers” were “the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born.”

In 1977, Jesse Jackson said “Abortion is black genocide.” Levitt argued that environment, not race, was the key in his study. However, the “environment” he cites is one primarily experienced by minorities, who are also disproportionately both the victims and the perpetrators of the “crimes.”

In 1939, Sanger’s organization launched the “Negro Project” to push birth control on the minority population. Today blacks make up about 13 percent of the population, but obtain more than one third of all abortions.

Some opponents say racism still drives parts of the pro-choice movement. One anti-abortion group posed as a donor looking to fund abortions targeted to the “black community.” In one case their actor exclaimed “the less black kids out there the better,” to which a Planned Parenthood worker responded “understandable.”

I think abortion opponents overplay this hand, as Bennett tried to illustrate in his ill-fated remarks. Abortion is wrong NOT because it targets minorities, but simply because killing children is wrong. Likewise, arguing that abortion is justified because we killed the “right” babies and thereby lowered the crime rate is reprehensible, suggesting we should punish innocent children for their perceived future criminal behavior.

This would be true even if Levitt’s argument was sound. But there are questions about his data and his conclusions.

For example, Levitt presumes that abortion reduced the “unwanted babies” which would tend to be criminals. But after Roe, pregnancies went up by 30 percent, while births only dropped six percent.

Most abortions aren’t to kill previously unwanted babies, but are simply a new form of birth control.

Abortion should stand or fall on its own merits. If abortion kills an innocent person, you can’t justify it by claiming that person was likely to be a criminal eventually.

But as humanity comes to the conclusion that the pre-born infant is in fact a person, those who defend the right to choose to kill that person for the benefit of others will need to reach for increasingly distasteful arguments to justify that killing.

Charles Reichley has been a Prince William County resident since 1981. He can be reached at {encode="critically thinking@msn.com" title="critically thinking@msn.com"}.