Freakonomics….Part II

I was so intrigued by the chapter on abortion in this book; I spent some time in the homeland of Ceausescu in 1999, staying in the very unheated Romanian apartment buildings described in the book. I had no idea it was the beneficiaries of Ceausescuâs anti-abortion policy who ultimately saw him thrown from office and violently executed, making Romania’s transition from communism the most dramatic of all the former Soviet nations. Obviously the political climate of post-Soviet Romania is markedly different from that of late 20th century USA; however I find it slightly ironic that a ban on abortion led to a leaders execution in one part of the world, while it’s legalization in the USA was parallelled by a dramatic drop in crime. Thus support for abortions ensured the success of politicians and lawmakers who campaigned against it on one side of the world, while the lives saved by an anti-abortion policy provided the momentum for political revolution and a violent, public execution of the policy maker.

I take this startling statistic way back to Genesis, where Joseph said “you meant this for evil, but the Lord used it for good.” I can’t really bring myself to support widespread abortion; I understand it is a sensitive and often loaded issue which I don’t pretend to have an answer for. However I do concur with Levitts comment in Freakonomics that when a woman does not wish to bear a child, she usually has a good reason for it.

Interesting to me is how the culture of the United States has morphed through several crisis:
-The segregation policies

-The crack Cocaine epidemic

-The homocide epidemic

All of which seem to have declined as the abortion rate increased…It’s harrowing to wonder what might have ensued has a generation not been prevented from being born. What America would be like as a nation today, had the abortion rulings of Roe Vs Wade not been upheld by the supreme court?

What would the streets be like?

What would the emerging generation be defined by?

I also wonder what kind of humanity is being cultivated in the nations that legalize abortion; it seems to have short-circuited in some ways the downside to the sexual and information revolutions, hiding from us the cost of our choices. I wonder if future generations will have to make painful changes due to our lack of foresight, much in the same way our generation is having to face the realities of global warming, caused in large part by those generations who are passing or have already passed?

Freaky….