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Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every
black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down"
Media Matters/The Ed Schultz Show
September 28, 2005
Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who
have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social
Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of
Education Bill Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations"
by declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole
purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate
would go down." Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies
"would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do,"
then added again, "but the crime rate would go down."
Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized
abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics
(William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But
Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to
grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore
more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based
argument.
From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's
Morning in America:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot
about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social
Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that
the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the
people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social
Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this
at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them
were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be,
too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women?
No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are,
yeah.
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.
Bill Bennett's Morning in America airs on approximately 115 radio stations
with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
— A.S.
A tip from The Ed Schultz Show contributed to this item. Thanks, and keep
them coming.
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