Later research showed a (I believe even stronger) link between leaded gasoline being phased out and reduced crime later. Environmental lead is well known to have psychological effects, including an increased propensity for violence.
I think the general belief is that environmental lead had the stronger effect, but legalized abortion can’t entirely be counted out, but I’m hardly an expert and I suspect it is all still under debate.
I don't think you understand the utility of having children. Neoliberals love this position because it effectively supports importing as many immigrants as possible for megacorps to pay bottom dollar to. There's an entire industry (industrial farming) that loves this.
> Less stress means better childrearing.
The context of this statement is not supported by the unmitigated economic disaster we are currently in, and have been in, since at least the great financial crisis.
> Abortion is an unmitigated good for most women who choose it.
Have you ever wondered why you can almost predict the location of abortion clinics by the number of pawn shops and pay day loan centers? When you break down those locations by race it may become more clear. Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and racist [0][1] who wished abortion to be used to clean out the mental defectives. Her own words: “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective,” [0]. What's funny is I could've swapped her name out with any 19th and 20th century dictator and you'd believe me.
It would be wonderful if activists stopped hiding behind the banner of freedom and acknowledge the roots of their alleged "unmitigated good".
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/07/21/pl...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221104040930/https://www.pbs.o...
Legalise abortion and the number of those children brought up with such a defining childhood fall, not completely, but statistically serial killers are rare anyway.
If an abuser can hustle a pregnant mother in for a quickie abortion, the clinic is happy to accomodate him, and then Mom is back on the streets or back into the brothel and making the big bucks. Turning one or two tricks will pay for that abortion, easily. But of course it's preferable that the child didn't live, because we can accurately predict that they'd have a sort of unhappy life, after all.
Abortionists are state-sponsored serial murderers, by any definition, and of course a couple of them have been caught in the act, such as Kermit Gosnell.
When a so-called medical professional is trained and skilled in decapitating a human, snipping her delicate, half-developed spine with scissors, dismembering her with long-handled forceps and scalpels, and then suctioning out every last trace of the "clump of cells", that sort of takes a moral toll on them.
For Kermit Gosnell, it was only a logical progression for him. He routinely performed "late-term abortions", that is, children who were capable of surviving, and living well, outside the womb. So Gosnell once in a while had a dilemma where a child would be delivered, still alive, still breathing and begging to live. Gosnell's impeccable medical training took charge of the situation, and he snipped her spine and tossed her into the Biohazard Bin all the same.
Kermit Gosnell benefited immensely from technology. He had ultrasound to guide him so he could perform a "safe abortion", that is, not harm the mother physically while he ripped the infant out of her belly. He had sterile tools and an autoclave where he and his staff could easily clean the blood and gore off the instruments so that they would not infect the next mother, or Gosnell himself. Isn't technology wonderful? That big ol' Biohazard Bin and the Stericycle Van that came to pick up barrels full of human remains, they have good technology too; their supply chains are down to a science, and they will clean up any serial killer evidence that Gosnell might have left behind. If only Gosnell would've done something about the adult witnesses.