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Originally Posted by filtherton
There is evidence that abortion was at least partly responsible for the drop in violent crime in the 90's. As far as i could tell, the people who wrote freakonomics in no way claimed that abortion would be an effective means of fighting crime, just that depending on how you look at the numbers, there is a very strong correlation between roe vs. wade and a drop in the crime rate a generation later. It would also be true that if everyone had an abortion, violent crime would eventually cease. I agree that bennet's words were taken out of context, but that only serves him right for taking the argument that abortion can be linked with a decrease in violent crime out of context.
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I haven't read Freakonomics so I don't know how they made the correlation, but I find these kinds of deductions bothersome in that anybody can make any correlation between any two events and make a loose causality relationship.
For example, I could say that replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup in Coca Cola helped lead to me having high cholesterol simply because one event preceeded the other. And while there may be some correlation, it is impossible to say that one was a direct cause of the other. We can always take stastistical information and make it say whatever we want it to say for a particular effect.