Men Wanting to Stay in Power

For my Junior year thesis, I explored the topic of Roe v. Wade and the hypothesis on how legalized abortion in the 1970’s reduced the violent crime rate in the 1990’s in America. So I was thrilled on hearing this weeks class was on the subject and made me think about why men wanted to control the rights of women. This viewpoint was famously discovered by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, published in their book Freakonomics. Using statistics and following trends of data they find correlations between two seemingly un-correlated sets of information using both logic and evidence. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision on the highly controversial court case, Roe v. Wade, the court ruled in a 7-2 verdict, that to deny a woman an abortion is unconstitutional. This clearly set precedent in the United States. In the first year of legalized abortion 750,000 women used that right, Peaking in 1980 with a rate of 100 abortions per 1000 lives. A lot of these women were teenagers, poor, and unmarried, and even all three. This leads to unwanted children and statistically unwanted children who live in inner cities lead to a life of crime when this is the childhood. The two leading causes of becoming a criminal are poverty and a single parent childhood. To put into perspective in 1970 crime rate across the country was at an all-time high, and began to drop off in 1991. This is 18 years after Roe v. Wade. This fits the profile of the prime demographic who commit a crime, young men between the age of 18 and 25 years old. As more and more women chose to have an abortion, children who would have grown up committing the crime were nowhere to be found, for they were not being brought up in such harsh environments.

After all the evidence and strong correlations, to go against this information is an obvious ploy for men in power to restrict women from the right to control their own bodies. This is yet again another example on how throughout history men have used their male dominance over women, to keep them below themselves in society.