Friday, September 30, 2005

The case of the crime-committing fetuses

Liberals are currently firing both barrels at former Education Secretary and current radio host Bill Bennett for saying that aborting black children would lower the crime rate.

Well, he did say that. But it's been horribly taken out of context. The entire exchange actually went thus:

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Liberals are all in a huff for a number of reasons. Many think he's actually advocating aborting black children. These people are, as they say, stupid. Or, perhaps worse, politically opportunistic. Bill Bennett is not advocating aborting black children. He even says so in the sentence directly following his controversial statement. In fact, Bill Bennett is a staunch opponent of abortion.

Then there are those that are outraged that Bennett, they claim, believes that black people cause crime. So? Black people do cause crime. 44% of prisoners in this country are black. Anyone who would try to argue that black people DON'T cause crime would be delusional.

Of course, every race has criminals. Some 34% of prisoners in America are white. Aborting all the white babies in this country would lower the crime rate, as well -- though arguably not as much as it would if all black children were aborted. Aborting every baby of ANY race would lower the crime rate. It would also lower the occurrence of car accidents, drug addiction and cancer, simply by virtue of the fact that there would be fewer people in the country.

Criminal tendencies are better predicted, however, by socio-economic status. That is to say, poor people commit more crime. And it just so happens, that black people in this country are disproportionately poor. But would Bennett’s comments have been better received if he’d used the word ‘poor’ instead of ‘black’? Certainly not.

But what I find most interesting about the whole ordeal is the concession by liberals that these black children would be alive if they hadn’t been aborted. Isn’t this a tacit admission that a fetus is a person? I mean, if they’re conceding the point that abortion on a large scale would have ANY effect on society, are they not also conceding that an abortion is an end, or at least a pre-emption, of a life?

And if that’s the case, how can these people continue to defend such a practice, let alone make it a major tenet of their political philosophy? It’s one thing to believe that a fetus isn’t really a person or a life -- I disagree, but at least it’s consistent in defending the practice of abortion.

It’s something completely different to defend abortion while admitting that it prevents people from being born. It’s morally repugnant at worst, inconsistent at best. And if there’s one that irritates me in politics and philosophy in general, it’s inconsistency.

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