Absence of abortion effect
It's not often that I'm forced to admit I was wrong, but logic must always bow before evidence. Adhering to this basic rule would save many people, especially intellectuals, from much public embarrassment. The author of "Freakonomics" has established a lucrative literary career from exploiting the human tendency to forget this truth, demonstrating how what everyone "knows" to be the case is frequently wrong due to their application of reason to a foundation of incomplete or inaccurate data.
As with its digital counterpart, human logic is only as good as its input. Garbage in, garbage out.
I had long assumed that because nearly 800,000 abortions are committed in the United States each year, there must have been a statistically significant, negative effect on the U.S. population in the recent past. After all, it is reasonable to assume that the destruction of 27.2 million unborn children over the last 34 years must have had some depressing effect on the numbers, even if the population has continued to grow during that time. Are we not caught up in the throes of an immigration debate? Is it not reasonable to suppose that the negative effect of abortion has been more than counterbalanced by the increase in mass immigration, especially considering the ongoing Mexican migration?
It has even been argued that one of the reasons Americans must accept immigration is because of the lamentable habit of so many American women to exterminate their offspring in the womb. While I am a restricted borders advocate myself, I have to confess that I did take this argument seriously and considered it a point for the open borders crowd that restrictionists would have to surmount.
This was because I made the very same mistake so often made by those I criticize, which is to say that I completely neglected to examine the relevant evidence while trusting in a train of thought that made superficial sense to me, rather like a liberal arguing that gun control reduces crime or a militant atheist arguing that religion causes war. In this case, the relevant evidence is the U.S. live birth rates from 1973 to the present.
In 1973, when the so-called right to abortion was miraculously discovered within the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution, the American live birth rate was 14.9. Thirty years later, the rate was 14.7, very slightly lower, but essentially the same in light of how it had risen as high as 15.8 during the intervening decades.
This means that contrary to what is commonly imagined, abortion by itself does not reduce the number of children that are born each year. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is true. How can this be? The answer is simple. Given the plethora of contraceptive means, women who don't want to have children will not have them regardless of the nature of the precise means available to them.
Despite the near-religious rhetoric with which pro-abortion women hail their "right" to child-murder, abortion is nothing more than one of the many forms of birth control. If it is available, women will make use of it. If it is not available, they will find other methods ranging from condoms and contraceptive paraphernalia to prescribed pills and injections to the same net effect. Abortion, then, is literally nothing more than a personal preference for the appalling sort of woman who prefers participating in a live human vivisection to swallowing a pill.
While abortion does not provide a reasonable basis for an argument against immigration, perhaps this statistical proof of its complete lack of necessity may prove to be a useful argument in support of an eventual ban on this violent, dehumanizing and unnecessary act.