Asymmetrical Information

I like your broad thesis a lot -- I suspect that lots of people on both sides of the abortion divide latch on to bad statistics to boost their cause -- but I don't see much evidence of it in your post. The Ampersand post you linked to (link is broken, but found it anyway) seems appropriately cautious about gleaning too much from the numbers he cites. And the pro-life link that recites guesses about how often the Pill acts as an abortifacient more or less ends by saying, flat out, that we can't know the numbers, but "best not risk it" (which, incidentally, is precisely the message I got at my confirmation classes as a young Catholic).

Moreover, while I agree that Leavitt is both very smart and super-amazing, I don't know that I fully trust his abortion conclusions or figures. First, if it is really true that conceptions rose by 30% in the years following Roe (and how do they calculate THAT?), it seems that one could use conception records, birth records, and adoption records over time to get a pretty clear idea of what the abortion rate was pre-Roe (e.g., conceptions - births = abortions and miscarriages (and we probably have decent data on how often babies miscarry)). Second, there is this. The writer seems a bit of a crank, but his critique of Leavitt seems compelling.

A similar argument could be made about studies of marijuana: pharmaceutical companies don't want the studies done, because mj can't be patented; the cotton industry doesn't want studies done, because hemp is a direct competitor (that goes for the paper industry too); and governments sure don't want studies done, because prohibition = control.

A few decades ago, Midge Decter once asked why are there so many abortions in this age of advanced contraception?

Of course, the problem with contraception with sexually promiscuous people (yes, I mean men as well since they are responsible for the children they conceive and no doubt exercise influence over their partners' decision whether or not to have the child) is that it only has to fail once.
So abortion becomes "Plan B."

Why is it that abortion is the only big business in the United States that liberals don't want regulated?

In my view, abortion also helps the progressive agenda. If you want to distribute resources, wealth, profits, etc. equally so no one feels resentful, is it practical and more beneficial that there are fewer people around, and thus their equal share is bigger?

A few decades ago, Midge Decter once asked why are there so many abortions in this age of advanced contraception?

Of course, the problem with contraception with sexually promiscuous people (yes, I mean men as well since they are responsible for the children they conceive and no doubt exercise influence over their partners' decision whether or not to have the child) is that it only has to fail once.
So abortion becomes "Plan B."

Why is it that abortion is the only big business in the United States that liberals don't want regulated?

In my view, abortion also helps the progressive agenda. If you want to distribute resources, wealth, profits, etc. equally so no one feels resentful, is it practical and more beneficial that there are fewer people around, and thus their equal share is bigger?

One thing I've wondered about is how effective defense in depth would be. If a woman is on the Pill *and* has an IUD *and* requires her lovers to wear condoms *and* uses a sponge or something comparable...how likely is she to become pregnant?

I'd think the odds of pregnancy under those circumstances would approximate the odds of winning the Powerball, but I have no data on which to base that conclusion. It's just a gut feeling.

This report from Planned Parenthood's think tank, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, shows the annual frequency of legal abortions: rising from close to zero in 1969 to 500,000 in 1971 (when abortion was legal in California, New York, and some other states) to 800,000 in the year of Roe, 1973, to about 1 million in 1975 to just under 1.6 million from about 1980 to 1990, declining to about 1.3 million in recent years.

http://www.guttmacher.org/presentations/trends.pdf

The solution to getting unpopular info in a free market? Charity. The people who want the information can set up an institution to get it, and fund that institution voluntarily. For example, the Guttmacher Institute, which is the best source for a lot of information about abortion because it is the only organization collecting such data.

Of course, it's not a perfect solution. If data is sufficiently unpopular, and/or sufficiently expensive - for example, information about life around Alpha Centauri - it may be that there simply isn't enough money available voluntarily to get that information. But that doesn't necessarily mean the info is useless. So one problem with charity is that it may leave important information undiscovered. (Of course, nothing else works here either, except undemocratic rule by a crank who happens to want to know unpopular things.)

Another "problem" if you want to call it that with private action is that it is not predictable in the sense many people would like for their own pet project. However, it does have the tremendous advantage of being possible in a free market economy such as our with no tinkering to the constitution of society.

Lesson here? If you want data, put your own damn money where your mouth is.

In my view, abortion also helps the progressive agenda. If you want to distribute resources, wealth, profits, etc. equally so no one feels resentful, is it practical and more beneficial that there are fewer people around, and thus their equal share is bigger?

I suppose you could look at it that way, but they'd try to put a redistributionist spin on it either way. If the poverty rate is low, then it won't cost us much to help the poor, and we should do it. If the poverty rate is high, then it's a huge problem, and we have to help them.

Personally, I welcome abortion precisely because of my opposition to redistribution. If we're going to have welfare programs, I want as few people as possible to qualify for them.

Isn't "how do the calculate THAT?" obvious? It's the number of live births plus the number of abortions -- which is an undercount, but, it's actually the relevant number of conceptions anyway.

In terms of abortion statistics, I would like to see good stats (i.e. not just hearsay) about the medical reasons behind late term abortions.

Sanjay -

You're probably correct to say that births + abortions = conceptions. But Leavitt's statement compares conceptions post-Roe (for years in which we have abortion data) with conceptions pre-Roe (for years in which the data are sketchy at best). I therefore assumed Leavitt had some other way of determining conceptions in the years pre-Roe, and wondered (and still wonder) what it was.

Births + abortions = conceptions only if you include spontaneous abortions (medically correct term for miscarriages) in your statistics.

People don't develop their points of view from statistical support; they use it to support their given bias. Information markets don't necessarily fail, because data is rarely categorically for or against anything. Even so, people believe that their opinion is legitimated by the use of "scientific evidence". The diversity of statistical quotation stems from pundits attempting to provide evidentiary cover for a personal opinion.

Joe Magarac ,

Thank you for the link toward the end of your first post.

Personally, I've always found it fascinating that the founder of "Planned Parenthood", Magaret Sanger, was a proudly self-described Eugenicist.

From that, it really is little surprise that Levitt's theory was not only swallowed whole, but also mega-phoned by the Imams of our day.

That this Q, writ large, is such a fullsome piece of our current "political debate" proves it the true Abortificant that Pro-lifers should be aligned against.

That we welcome the State into this discussion should illuminate just how emaciated our conception, of Liberty, has become.

I am not sure the information markets fail. I think they provide exactly the information that the people who really care about the information truly want i.e. something they can use to justify their pre-existing ideas.

The only people who could actually use the information to make a decision are those without a firm opinion on the matter in the first place. Those people don't care enough about the issue to spend any resources on researching it.

No amount of research about the tradeoffs of abortion are going to change the minds of the people driving it as a political issue. Most of the "research" on the matter is driven by the dweebs in marketing.

The Leavitt-Sailer debate over the abortion/crime link dates back to a series of dialogues in Slate way back in 1999, in other words long predating the publication of Freakonomics. It's not easy determining who's right. My take: it all comes down to crack. If you believe the crack epidemic was a big apocalyptic event, the spike in crime rates among people born after Roe v. Wade (1973) can be explained away, and Leavitt is probably correct. If instead you believe that the crack epidemic was not quite so dramatic, it's much harder to explain the crime wave among the post-'73ers and Sailer is probably correct.

I don't have a dog in this fight and this is somewhat off the topic,but this:
"pro-life groups don't say "best not risk it"--they treat dispensing birth control as the equivalent of a war crime" Isn't my experiance at all with the "pro-life" groups of which I'm familiar. Who/what group is being characterized here?

Mike, I wonder about that, too. There must still be some Catholics outside the Vatican that oppose contraception simply because it is contraception, so I'm wondering if Megan heard from some of them. Not that the details of how the pill works is the main reason they oppose it.

However, if the Right to Lifers actually believed that a fertilized ovum is a human being, you'd think they would be screaming about the pill as long as there is the slightest possibility that it might let an egg get fertilized and then block implantation. Of course, politically that bit of logical consistency would be suicidal...

Rather like the theory that a healthy 9-month fetus is not a "baby" until it clears the birth canal, and so it's OK to stick a scissors into it's head 15 seconds before it would become a "baby" has hurt the pro-choicers politically.

Why should we care how many abortions there are ?

Do we try to count how many times people exercise their freedom of speech ?

Why should we care how many abortions there are?

Do we try to count how many times people exercise their freedom of speech?

Possibly in your mind the two are no different, but the practical evidence leaves room for a lot of disagreement.

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