The Defence of Bill Bennett and the Half Blood Prince

Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias note that Bill Bennett's outrageous statement is clearly true and that his point was to argue against considering consequences and not rights when debating abortion. Yglesias writes

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

Not only is Bennett clearly not advocating a campaign of genocidal abortion against African-Americans, but the empirical claim here is unambiguously true. Similarly, if you aborted all the male fetuses, all those carried by poor women, or all those carried by Southern women, the crime rate would decline.

OK that's good Matt but if you want a reductio ad absurdam so absurd that it is clear even to US Senators of Bennett's reductio ad absurdam why stop a quarter measures. It is clear that if all babies were aborted, the crime rate would plummet in about 16 years. At least it is reasonable to surmise this, since older teenagers and young adults commit many more crimes than middle aged and elderly adults.

There would, of course, be presumably undesirable side effects such as the extinction of humanity, but the crime rate sure would drop.

Of course, to be fair to Senator Reid, he clearly understands what Bennett said, understands how closely the public is parsing Bennett and is playing hard ball. Finally to be totally fair to Bill Bennett, when I think of Bill Bennett I do wonder whether extinction of humanity which would give evolution another chance to produce intelligent decent life forms would be a bad thing.