Is there a link between abortion and crime ?

[Xiahou]

How? Seriously, what if the sperm you eliminate earlier in the day would have impregnated a woman later that night? And why is stopping an egg from being fertilized not exactly like removing that same egg alter on?

I hesitate to answer here, but I assume your question is sincere.... The difference between a fertilizaed egg and a lone sperm or unfertilized egg is obvious. Alone, they are indeed just another cell in your body, however, once the egg is fertilized it has it's own DNA which is completely distinct from either the mother or father and it will never exist again. At that point it has everything it needs to develop into an adult- hair color, eye color, height, and many other attributes are already decided.

Hard to see how we can get very far into it without getting into statistical gobbledygook.

Like I said, if they only used total arrests and not arrests per 100,000 or whatever it's easy for me to see how it could skew data based on population growth. No gobbledygook needed for that. The link was mainly to illustrate that their correlation is not a given and that there are many statisticians who claim to find fault with it.

For my part, even if there is correlation I dont really care. As others have pointed out, correlation is not causation. Therefore, the Freakonomics assertion is without basis imo.

[rory_20_uk]

The egg can theoreticll make it to a human.

If it implants. Many fail to do so.
Those that do have on average a 1 in 3 chance of aborting. Sometimes this happens so early the woman never knows she was pregnant.

If you analyse a given amount of data eventually you'll get a grouping that you want.

If a computer fires dots completely randomly at a background there will be grouping, and one can then blow these up into "hotspots" of whatever it happens to be.

[Claudius the God]

I remember reading about how many thousands of Irish girls and women travel from Ireland to the U.K. where they can get a legal abortion...

[Samurai Waki]

Anyone can make a statistic about anything totally unrelated to each other.

Did you know that the Increase of Global Disasters has Risen while the number of Pirates on earth have fallen? Just look at this handy graph!

[Papewaio]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

[Ja'chyra]

Obviously there is a link, the more abortions there are the less single parents there will be and we all know it is the children from single parent families that cause all the crime.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Obviously there is a link, the more abortions there are the less single parents there will be and we all know it is the children from single parent families that cause all the crime.

Yet demographics tell us that, in most Western countries, the number of unwed mothers has increased -- both as a raw number and as a percentage -- during the time frames when abortion has been legal and more or less generally available. This says to me that some other change is driving both and that one cannot "cure" the other.

I agree that single parent househoulds and crime frequency correlate, but nobody has demonstrated a causal link statistically yet (at least I haven't seen it). Not saying it isn't there, but as noted above, demonstrating a causal link is much more difficult then suggesting the nature of that link.

Don't assume causality when both phenomena may be symptoms of some larger cause. Remember, in virtually all instances, an increase in the number of churches in a given community is very highly correlated with an increase in the number of prostitutes.

[Reenk Roink]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

If you murder everyone there would be no crime...

[GoreBag]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

Ah, Calculus serves me well. The more aborted, the fewer crimes we have, just so long as we don't push it to the limit.