Helen Rumbelow – The availability of the morning-after pill is bound to reduce births of unwanted and potentially criminal children.
The morning-after pill: what a lifesaver! At least that’s what some Conservative politicians may be thinking as they recover from the excitement of the Queen’s Speech. I’m not talking about the need for emergency contraception in the new coalition Parliament — although these are truly heady times — but the role of abortion in cutting crime.
We have just heard that abortion rates have started to fall in the UK, countering a trend that’s been on the up for decades. That should be a good thing, right? Well of course, unless you, as any good free-market economist, are well versed in the theory that the abortion rate and the crime rate are linked.
Abortion, so the theory goes, disposes of the criminals of the future. A child that is truly yearned for has more chance of being nurtured into a good citizen. By contrast, an unwanted baby joins a band of feral thieves as featured in the musical Oliver!, who when they question Fagin about their career options are told to “shut up and drink your gin”.
This idea was naturally a little controversial when it was expounded by the American economist Steven Levitt in the bestseller Freakonomics a few years ago. Yet although it has been heavily criticised, Levitt still stands by his analysis, which forges a direct link between abortions and teenage criminal offences a decade or so later.
No one has done the maths in Britain, but our rising abortion rate and falling crime rate have crossed on a graph throughout the 1990s. New Labour, in trumpeting the success of its “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” policies, may not have included “a roaring trade at the termination clinic”, but is likely to have benefited enormously from it all the same.
So could this new dip in the abortion rate mean that, a decade or so from now, a generation of teenage thugs will be tearfully telling their probation officers that “my mother never loved me”? It’s a nightmarish idea for the incoming government.
But we are fortunate to have a more secular approach to abortion here. It wasn’t an issue in our election debates, but in America it is the dreariest of all their political bugbears. While the American hit comedy series Glee has millions of teenage fans in Britain, they will find one of its central storylines strange. Quinn, the teenage cheerleader, gets pregnant, but never considers either emergency contraception or an abortion. Or, indeed, raising the damn thing. Instead Quinn is forced into the American screen’s standard but statistically unlikely cop-out — see Juno and many like it — of giving her baby up for adoption.
In Britain emergency contraception has been booming ever since it was made available to buy over the counter in 2001 — five years ahead of America. Sure, you have to endure the pharmacists’ pantomime of privacy, in which they furrow their brow in order to transform a high street shop till into the appropriate place to discuss your unwanted dandruff/piles/fast-dividing clump of cells trying to root in your abdomen.
But if British abortions are on the wane because of the success of the morning-after pill, then — for the Levitt disciples, anyway — crime statistics will be unaffected.
This week the NHS watchdog NICE recommended that emergency contraception should be made even more freely available, with women allowed to stock up their medicine cabinets with the drug. I expect that policy will be fast-tracked by the new health minister. Just a guess.
Mariella frostrup claimed yesterday that the reason there aren’t “more women on the Today programme is because they’re a bunch of misogynists.” I disagree.
It’s not women they have a problem with, it’s modernity. The flagship Radio 4 programme casts for those who repel 21st-century life. Candidates must prove that they can “guffaw” or “chuckle” at a bad weather joke. They have to pass a test showing they can proffer a judicious use of the word “indeed”.
You can, like Sarah Montague, be female, as long as you sound as though you were laced into your corset when the poorer classes still kept their filthiness hidden from the ladies. To hear them, yesterday morning, attempt to enunciate the names in story of the return of the abducted twins “Vixen Rae and Billy Blue” was like hearing Lady Bracknell elocute the voiceover to Big Brother.
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May 29th, 2010








