Bill Bennett's Big Mouth

Recently, former cabinet member, recovering gambler, current talk-radio host and full time right-wing blowhard Bill Bennett got in trouble with what people like him like to call the "mainstream media" because of comments he made regarding race, crime and abortion.

Bennett's exact words were that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." He was smart enough, however, to immediately backtrack by saying that it would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do."

His politically correct caveat notwithstanding, Bennett has been strongly criticized by many of the usual suspects on the left -- from Al Sharpton (gee, what a shock that is!) to Howard Dean. Colby King, the Washington Post’s Deputy Editorial Page Editor and columnist, referred to Bennett as "the poster child for racism,” adding that that “there's no way you can parse his words and get away from what he said. What he said was morally reprehensible. He has said, in effect, that blacks have a predisposition for being criminals.”

Well, not exactly. What Bennett said (in what he called a "thought experiment") was that if you aborted every black baby the crime rate would go down. And there's a problem with this statement that his critics on the left have failed to recognize.

The problem is that he's right.

Bennett's "thought experiment" is basically a rip-off of the analysis in the bestselling book "Freakonomics" that pointed out that everywhere abortion was made legal in the United States, the crime rate went down. Of course, there's a bit of a time lag -- close to twenty years, in fact -- but basically the fact that America is safer from crime now than it was in the 1970s is due in large part to the availability of safe and legal abortion.

This means two things. First, Bennett is right -- but he didn't take his "thought experiment" far enough. First of all, you don't have to abort all the babies of a given ethnic group to make crime go down -- just the boys. The vast majority of the violent crime in any society is committed by young men aged 15 to 25. So why pick on the girls? If you eliminated the black boys from a society, the crime rate would, eventually, go down. But what Bennett didn't say was that crime would also go down if you aborted the males of any other ethnicity. If you let the black boys live and aborted the white boys, crime would go down as well. Let the white and black boys live and eliminate the Hispanic boys, crime would also go down. So Bennett's comments, while technically correct, were incomplete.

The second thing to ponder, while we await the first session of the Roberts court this week, is that Roe v. Wade is, at least in my opinion, sure to be overturned in the next decade to a decade and a half. Make abortion illegal (as some states would be sure to do if Roe is overturned), and the states that criminalized abortion would see their crime rates skyrocket in the next twenty years -- exactly the way it did in the mid-1960s.

Will this actually happen? No one can tell for certain, but check back with me in 2035 and we'll find out together.

Tom Moran