I've been reading Steven Levitt's
Freakonomics (2006) over the last few days and have been amazed at the frankness in which the author(s) write about some very sensitive subjects. Namely, abortion.
Now I just had a conversation with my wife (who thinks I'm too harsh) in which I said Christians have no right to be easily-offended. "Wise as serpents..." Throughout my life I've seen Christians hide their eyes at PG violence or write angry letters over NBC prime-time sex jokes. I've watched Christian high schoolers stunned by a classmate's foul language and Christian college students shocked and (particularly)
enraged by peer sex and drinking habits.
I say: "get over it! That's the world! Now find out how to love them!"
My argument there is that Jesus spent his time with the people most Christians hide from. We aren't meeting the world in the non-smoking section, in Christian bookstores, or in the cafes our churches erect so we don't have to go to
non-Christian coffee shops! In every way we're able, we hide ourselves from "the least of these." Or maybe, more accurately: "the REALEST of these."
That's reality. But I digress...
When I read in
Freakonomics that the author was arguingn for legalized abortion as the
single biggest reason for the
single largest drop of violent crime in US history (in the 90s) I wasn't
offended that someone would dig for good in something I generally view as [mostly] negative. But I must admit I was a little shocked by the seemingly-detached tone in which the idea was introduced (I guess that's just the way of a number crunching economist).
AND I was (and still am) a little scared about what the results mean for society.
In the late 90s, violent crime - and crime in general - in America was at an all time high. And it was climbing! Experts, media and community leaders all over the country were predicting total chaos at our doorsteps - the future looked bleak! And then all of the sudden the crime rates dropped. And
KEPT dropping. Plummeting, really. The same experts, politicians, law enforcement and media speculated and took credit for the reasons behind the drop - but no one suggested what Levitt suggests in his book: that by the mid-to-late-90s, the babies who would have been
most likely to grow up into criminals, weren't around. Their mothers never had them. A generation of millions of "would-be-criminals" had been aborted, thanks to Roe v. Wade.
Maybe this isn't as shocking as I'm making it. Maybe it's moreso. I've heard people before making poor arguments against abortion by saying, "what if the baby grew up to be the next Adolf Hitler? Then wouldn't abortion have been valid?" These hypotheticals are pointless, and of course hindsight is 20/20.
Stepping outside of the polarized abortion debate and recognizing that most people from both sides of the fence would acknowledge abortion isn't beneficial for
everyone and certainly isn't a responsible alternative to birth control:
is it dangerous to look, quantitatively, at human life? Abortion. Murder. Infanticide. Manslaughter. Obviously we track these things, and greater numbers mean greater loss. But what Levitt does with this line of questions and conclusions is weigh human life against human life...
- "How many fetuses equal the value of a birthed baby?"
- "How many abortions are worth the value of a prevented murder?"
It's not that the questions aren't compelling. It's not even that I think they aren't worth asking. They just make me nervous... and I wonder if they lead to other questions and eventually to attitudes, and with those attitudes, ways of life that regard humans in numbers where our Creator sees individuals: heart and soul.
Maybe I'm just being sensitive or prudish. And I don't mean to sound like a picket-sign-wielder. That isn't me. But maybe the value of life wasn't meant to be quantified. Maybe it can't be quantified...
please read more about my thoughts on the evolution of Christianity at http://www.emergingchristianity.blogspot.com/
