A World of Harm for Women

[August]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

You can try an idealist and bang the "personal responsibility" drum and watch the crime rate soar, or you can be a realist and invest a pittance into making birth control easily accessible to all.

And still watch the crime rate soar because birth control is not related to poverty or crime.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by August

And still watch the crime rate soar because birth control is not related to poverty or crime.

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by August

And still watch the crime rate soar because birth control is not related to poverty or crime.

Source?

Because peer-reviewed academic research certainly suggests otherwise.

Examples:
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...alized2001.pdf
http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/bj...nindyaSen1.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/c7072230p7201016/

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by CCIP

Source?

Because peer-reviewed academic research certainly suggests otherwise.

Examples:
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...alized2001.pdf
http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/bj...nindyaSen1.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/c7072230p7201016/

CCIP,

These articles deal with abortion and crime. Is abortion a contraception device or form of birth control? Generally the pill, condoms, foam, IUD and the like are birth control. Abortion is after the fact. The birth was not controlled.

[August]

Besides in their attempt to prove their point they reject the more (to me) likely reasons for the drop in crime rates

IE

They have offered an array of explanations: the increasing use of incarceration, growth in the number of police, improved policing strategies such as those adopted in New York, declines in the crack cocaine trade, the strong economy, and increased expenditures on victim precautions such as security guards and alarms.

That's an awful lot to dismiss in favor of one single cause. Some of the things also not mentioned are gun control laws and social programs designed to help inner city youths.

[CCIP]

Well, all of those articles address "reduction in fertility rates", and for two of them that's actually a central point. Reduction in fertility rates = the pill, in the vast majority of cases.

I'm not arguing for this as a magic and completely fair solution, by the way. But pragmatically, there is a connection between fertility rates, unwanted pregnancy, and crime rates. Now, I haven't found a cost-benefit analysis and I'd be curious about that - but I really suspect that at the end of the day, it is not a bad deal. As far as cost to society, more people on birth control is automatically more economical than the next-best options, including doing nothing.

What is possible to argue is that it's unfair and unethical to support something you don't agree with, and to pay for something that you believe people should be providing for themselves. The ethical argument for not paying other people to have more sex without consequences with money that you earned with your own hard work is still perfectly valid.

August: I'm not sure how far you read into these, but none of the articles dismiss other factors as far as I could tell. Even the most "cocky" one of the three only suggests that legal abortion accounts for "only" 50% of the drop, with good arguments for where those other 50% are. The others are even more conservative. And these are just 3 examples of many. As I said, the only thing I've not found is a cost-benefit analysis about subsidized pills specifically.