Dialogue: Are we using abortion to raise quality of society?

So abortion is again back on the menu, with Women's Affairs Minister Laila Harre saying the Government is unlikely to make good its promise to overhaul "outdated" abortion legislation before the next election.

While Justice Minister Phil Goff has instructed officials to draft legislative changes to remove the need for two consultants to approve each abortion, right-to-life proponents are cranking up their objections to possible changes and to the law as it exists. But in a similar way to the economic upside that is now being attached to divorce - that it doubles the market - researchers are now redefining the economic and social consequences of abortion.

Abortion used to be a purely moral issue. The debate surrounding termination centred on the individual's right to choose. The last time this subject hit the headlines, the leader of the Christian Heritage Party, Graham Capill, suggested that realistic foetus photos would jig the consciences of women contemplating abortion.

The opposition, of course, countered with the usual well-reasoned, women's-right-to-choose argument. But that was the extent of the dialogue - the same old moral high grounding, reasons and refutations trundled out for the umpteenth time.

But perhaps the moral equation has at last reached its use-by date. New research in the United States has come up with a unique angle. Becoming known as the abortion bonus, the research centres on the correlation between abortion rates and the startling drop in crime in major American cities.

Abortion may account for as much as half of the decreases in the American crime rate, say researchers Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donahue, of Stanford University law school. They add that the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which legalised abortion throughout the US, means that many people who might have become crooks in the 1990s were never born.

The Levitt-Donahue theory holds that a high proportion of the women who received legal abortions after 1973 might otherwise have given birth to unwanted, economically deprived children raised in single-parent or dysfunctional families - the type of background that often produces delinquents.

The researchers note that it was when children born after 1973 had just reached the trouble-prone age that crime started its downturn. Five states had legalised abortion in 1970, three years before the rest. Interestingly, the researchers discovered that these were the first states to register crime decreases.

That abortions (or at least the legal ones) really took off in the late 1970s explains the modest numbers of people now in their mid-20s and younger. And, while I have no sociological studies to back me up, it would seem safe to assume that many women who sought these abortions would, as Levitt and Donahue found in the US, be poorly educated and economically disadvantaged.

That would help to explain why the abortion boom has arrived despite widespread sex-education programmes, such as those run by the Family Planning Association.

Are the American researchers suggesting that, as a species, we are spontaneously controlling the quality of our populations through termination, or are they saying that there is a surreptitious conspiracy to manipulate entire populations?

Either way, we moderns are in good company. After all, Mein Kampf was predicated on control of the gene pool, Plato's philosophy was that bad elements should not be allowed to reproduce, and limpieza de sangre - the purity of blood - was the justification for the Inquisition.

Extrapolating the concept of abortion as a population-control tool, whether conscious or otherwise, sparks a number of interesting ideas. On one side it removes a cast of people who are traditionally economically dependent on the state, draining tax reserves without replenishing the wider community in an economically tangible way.

Downstream, this removal releases resources from such areas as policing, incarceration services and education and frees them to be used in effective community creation.

Perhaps abortion is not solely a sign of moral decline but an example of the momentum towards upscaling and improvement - a morphic desire by the general population to create a better population. If so, you would think the environment that is gradually being created by rampant abortion would suit many anti-abortion advocates very well. White, upwardly mobile, stable, well-mannered and well-behaved taxpayers would prevail.

On the negative side, successful abortion campaigns, while reducing populations and theoretically reducing demands on resources and our fragile ecosystem, might actually increase the abuse and damage.

One of the key findings of the United Nations GEO 2000 report was that environmental degradation is known to be caused by excessive consumption by the minority - in other words, the middle classes, the most excessive consumers since history began.

So whether rampant abortion is a bonus or a hindrance to the development of society, the latest findings will enliven and perhaps revive a debate that has been mired in simplistic notions of right and wrong.

* Barbara Sumner is an Auckland writer.