Social and Economic Costs of Legal Abortion

At the World Congresses of Families in Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Madrid, and the demographic summits in Moscow and Ulyanovsk,[1]I presented and updated a country-by-country model of fertility, which has since been published in my book Redeeming Economics.[2] I’d like to extend that analysis. We often assume that abortion is a tragic byproduct of our current culture of family breakdown. In fact, legal abortion is the main cause of family breakdown, including specifically the rise in rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and crime, and the entry of most developed nations—now including the United States—into “demographic winter.” Fifteen years ago I published a paper on the “Socioeconomic Costs of Roe v. Wade.” In it, I estimated the impact of legal abortion in reducing the U.S. population (about 20% so far) and concluded, “taken in its entirety, legal abortion is perhaps the single largest American economic event of the past century, more significant than the Great Depression or the Second World War” (see Figure 1).[3] (Figure 1) In sidebars I considered important collateral results: For example, showing that legal abortion is single-handedly responsible for the prospective deficits in the pay-as-you-go social security retirement system (see Figure 2), and suggesting that legal abortion was also directly responsible for the 1970s and 1980s rise in crime rates.[4] (Figure 2) I was just starting the book which systematized these insights. The cover features Gustave Doré’s engraving, “Arrival of the Good Samaritan at the Inn,” because, transcending nationality and religion, the parable illustrates all the possible economic transactions we can have with our fellow man: the robbers beating a man and leaving him for dead illustrate crime; the priest and Levite who passed him by illustrate indifference; the innkeeper’s bargain with the Samaritan illustrates justice in exchange; and finally, the Samaritan’s devotion of time and mo
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