From an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in the LA Times: OurKids Are Not Doomed
Tying such dire predictions of social decay to divorce and single motherhood seemed credible in the 1970s and 1980s. But a funny thing happened in the 1990s: Almost every negative social trend tracked by the census, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Justice declined.
Teen birthrates fell by 30% between 1991 and 2002. The number of violent crimes in schools was halved between 1992 and 2002. Teen homicide rates dropped to their lowest level since 1966. Teen suicides decreased by 25%, and drug abuse, binge drinking and smoking all fell.
Yet the number of couples living together unmarried increased by more than 70% over the decade; the population at large increased by only 13% during this period. Gay and lesbian parenting became more common. The number of families headed by single mothers rose five times faster than the number of married-couple families.
Obviously, attributing the improvements of the 1990s to the continued increases in families headed by single moms is as absurd as blaming all the social ills of the 1980s on divorce.
Single parenthood does increase the risk that teens will get into trouble. But so do poverty, parental conflict, frequent school relocation, parental substance abuse and even an emotionally distant relationship with married parents.
Studies show that the majority of teens who exhibit serious behavior problems have five or more separate risk factors in their lives.
Read the whole thing, that’s my advice.
Exactly…
Single moms in this country have been blamed for everything from hangnails to international terrorism…
My only question is who did they blame for the decay of the republic before single moms were invented????
Feminists?
Women in general. They blamed “bad” mothers, wives, sisters, daughters….
Great article, though, thanks for posting.
Who before? There was the Negroes, the Jews, the Mexicans, the eastern European immigrants, esp. the Jewish ones, the Irish, the suffragettes, the Negroes again, the Indians, the Jews again…
*nod* I always wondered how people who were screaming that not being married automatically made your child a crack addict accounted for the fact that many unwed fathers spent more time with their kids than dads, albeit married to their moms, who worked 80 hour weeks and barely even looked at their kids.
It’s interesting — there is a professor who is (at least now) at the University of Chicago who ascribes these trends to the legalization of abortion (i.e., the unwanted children at highest risk aren’t here, and their would-be parents went on to become parents at a point in their lives when their children were at much lower risk, resulting in a generally lower risk profile for children overall). I think his last name is Leavitt. I don’t really buy it, I mean, I understand the logical basis of his theory, but I think it’s something that is probably incapable of proof. Plus, it probably assumes too much about the suitability of parents who chose to have children versus those who chose not to. It also assumes that abortion wasn’t occurring prior to legalization.
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since someone asked, I present to you: scapegoats, in reverse chronological order
“terraists”
gays
single mothers
communists
the Japanese
big corperations
communists
immigrants
communists AND women
Freemasons
carpet baggers
abolitionists or anti-abolitionists, depending on latitude
foreigners
different foreigners
canadians
the brittish
the french
quakers
women again
more brittish
french for about a millenium
pagans
christians
greeks
jews
keep in mind, if they happened to have any Jews around, Jews get priority. it’s a last in, first out sort of thing.
I’m queer and Jewish. Do I get bonus points?
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Blacks and Hispanics(even native born ones) continue to be popular in the south.
Steve Sailer has debunked Steve Levitt’s claim that abortion cut crime fairly effectively. As for why crime decreased so much in the 1990s? Mainly because of the huge increase in incarceration rates. People may complain that we have 2 million people behind bars, but the fact that they are behind bars and not on the street is much of why the crime rate has dropped so much. Also, the fact that a lot of the people involved in the crack wars of the late 1980s got killed or crippled in those wars has a lot to do with it as well (and p[erhaps the fact that a lot of little kids growing up in the 80s saw their brothers getting killed in drive-bys and decided to try a less risky life-style).
The problem with the abortion-cuts-crime theory (which is, at base, the theory that abortion reduced the black population, who are more likely to be violent criminals – considering the fact that the black abortion rate is much higher than the white abortion rate, it is difficult to deny that this is the undertone of the theory) is that:
(a) It assumes that abortion greatly reduced the population. In fact, most of the evidence suggests that after the legalization of abortion, people became more careless with sex; conceptions skyrocketed after Roe v. Wade while births declined only about 5-6%; most of the abortions pobably would not have been conceived in the first place if abortion has not been available.
(b) It assumes that the people who were the parents most likely to give birth to future criminals were the ones having the most abortions. In fact, it eems more likely that the people having abortions were those with hopes of joining the middle class. Those who were totally irresponsible parents often are people who just let s**t happen, and who might not bother geting an abortion. In fact, abortion may have had a dysgenic rather than eugenic effect on the black population, by “hollowing out” the middle class.
These numbers, which are in line with plenty of other objective studies, only go up to 2002. I’d be interested to see the data for such things as teen pregnancies, etc. in the post-Bush era of 50’s sensibility sex “education” and cuts to all those social programs for families. We won’t know the full effects of those changes for a few more years. 2010 should be interesting.
I thought that the prevailing theory on the decrease of crime in the ’90s was the good economy and the aging population. I thought that the theory of increased incarceration had been fairly well debunked. Damn, now I have to figure out where it was that I read all this. I’m pretty sure it was a book, not an article, that drew its conclusions from various studies. Hmmm, this could take me a while.
(a) It assumes that abortion greatly reduced the population.
I’m no fan of Levitt’s claim on empirical or moral grounds (for the racial undertones you mention) but I don’ t think it succeeds or fails on the grounds of the general population rate. The logic is that the children most likely to be unwanted, unappreciated, unafforded, neglected, etc. weren’t born, and they are the ones most likely to commit crimes. This doesn’t say anything about the population trends in general, as the theory only applies to a small subset of the population.
djw:
I’ll rephrase what I meant by “reduces the population.” I meant that he assumed that the abortions would have instead been births had Roe v. Wade not happened. Steve Sailer argues that the majority of aborted fetuses would never have been conceived in the first place in the absence of Roe v. Wade Abortions of fetuses that would not have been conceived without Roe v. Wade are a wash, statistically. An increase in the number of abortions of fetuses who would be unwanted, unappreciated, unafforded, or neglected had they been born only reduces the number of unwanted, etc. children if those children would have still been conceived in the absence of Roe v. Wade.
“Steve Sailer argues that the majority of aborted fetuses would never have been conceived in the first place in the absence of Roe v. Wade Abortions of fetuses that would not have been conceived without Roe v. Wade are a wash, statistically. An increase in the number of abortions of fetuses who would be unwanted, unappreciated, unafforded, or neglected had they been born only reduces the number of unwanted, etc. children if those children would have still been conceived in the absence of Roe v. Wade.”
I sometimes think Steve Sailer has interesting things to say…this time isn’t one of them…for HOW can anyone know whether a child would have been CONCEIVED or not????
Legalization of abortion happened in the early 70. The sexual revolution took place in the late 60s/early 70s…so is he saying people would not have CONCEIVED so many children, if abortion was not legal…
Seems a little far fetched.
Actually I find people who tend to use abortion as a method of birth control are not planful enough to make those sorts of calculations before having sex…
It’s like thinking that the death penalty stops someone from murdering…it doesn’t, probably for the same reason. As the sort of person who generally murders someone isn’t thinking about the long-term impact of their actions…they’re generally (not always but generally) impulsive, unstable and not planful people…
Sailer is assuming that an impulsive action involves a lot of planning…
I think Steve Sailer based his theory on the fact that the number of pregnancies, ending either in birth or abortion, greatly increased after Roe v. Wade. Without an alternative universe, we cannot know for certain if this would have occurred without Roe v. Wade, but it seems like a reasonable assumption.
1) Do you have a link to someplace where Steve Sailer explains this theory in detail, and where the data he’s using comes from?
2) What makes it seem like a reasonable assumption?
3) Abortion was legal in some states before Roe. Has Steve Sailer, or anyone else, done a state-by-state analysis to see if individual states had large increases in pregnancy after abortion was legalized?
which is, at base, the theory that abortion reduced the black population, who are more likely to be violent criminals
No. The theory is that abortion reduced the young people population, which means less crime. Less people = less criminals, not merely ‘violent’ criminals.
This link gives you a compendium of his articles on abortion. He does deal with some aspects of the fact that some states legalized abortion earlier than others (e.g. that the same states that legalized abortion eary and had an earlier drop in crime were also the states that saw crime rise earlier than the others). I don’t recall if he noticed the change in birthrates, though.
If he doesn’t answer your questions in the linked articles, he would probably be willing to look into it if you emailed him at SteveSlr@aol.com.
There is also the small problem that there is at least some evidence that the rate of abortion did not actually rise nearly as much after Roe so much as the reporting of abortion improved because, of course, no one faced criminal penalties for admitting to having performed or undergone an abortion. So using Roe as a watershed by Levitt or Sailer is problematic unless they can solve that conundrum. I happen to think the abortion rate probably did rise somewhat, but it didn’t go from zero to 25% of all pregnancies (I think that’s in the ballpark at the high water mark) in a span of less than 10 years.
But I think Levitt’s main problem is that, while not impossible, it is difficult to prove that those who had abortions were ab initio more likely to give birth to higher risk children than those who didn’t abort. Most likely, a whole host of factors, perhaps including increased access to abortion, played a role in declining crime rates. At any rate, here in the nation’s capital, there has been a steady increase in violent crime over the last couple of years, after a decade of decline. The story is hardly over.