Gladwell has a long and fascinating response to Freakonomics up on his blog, which includes this brilliant twist on the abortions-cause-the-crime-rate-to-drop argument:

For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960's. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn't want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn't lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970's, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but, Levitt argues, that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals.

Comments

[Steph Mineart]

That's a very telling distinction, but it's so subtle that most people aren't going to get it, I suspect. I'll have to visit Gladwell's and see what people are saying.

[amol sarva]

This argument supposes the plan-ahead, have-money, are-comfortable-saying-"I have sex give me a drug" types who used the Pill are the same as the ones who got pregnant and had abortions.

The family planning tools were made available unequally, and so their results could very well have been unequal.