Jonathan Gruber: abortion reduces welfare, crime, and black births

ObamaCare architect, Jonathan Gruber has been removed from the Massachusetts Health Connector Board after calling the American people stupid.

The MIT economist professor was involved in the construction of ObamaCare visiting the White House on several occasions and has also made several controversial statements linking abortion to eugenics, the reduction of welfare, crime, and black births.

A look at the White House visitor logs reveals that Gruber was a regular at the Obama White House.

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While apologizing for his insulting statements to the American people Gruber was also grilled on controversial eugenics like statements he made on abortion, referring to the poor as “marginal children” and calling for “positive selection.”

In Gruber’s 1998 paper, “Abortion legalization and child living circumstances who was the marginal child,” he concludes that the legalization of abortion saved the government fourteen billion dollars in welfare payments.

In 2006, Gruber authored another paper with Phillip B. Levine, Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, and Douglas Staiger called, Abortion and Selection, where they again use terms like “marginal child” and “positive selection through abortion.”

“Two earlier papers investigated the implications of such positive selection through abortion for the quality of cohorts born after abortion legalization. Gruber, Levine and Staiger (GLS, 1999) found that the legalization of abortion led to significant improvements in the circumstances of children born into cohorts where abortion was legal. Such cohorts of children lived in households with lower rates of single motherhood, welfare receipt and poverty, and experienced lower infant mortality than nearby cohorts of children. Donohue and Levitt (DL, 2001) focused on a relevant outcome for children at older ages and young adults, crime.1 They found that increased use of abortion in the 1970s resulted in lower crime rates among the cohorts born in that era when those cohorts were in their late teens and early 20s,” the paper reads.

Abortions decrease birth rates in Non-White women:

In a 1999 paper published by the American Journal of Public Health Phillip B. Levine, Douglas Staigei; (both co-authors with Gruber on his paper) along with Thomas J. Kane and David J. Zimnmerman, entitled, Roe v Wade and American Fertility, the group points out that when abortions are made legal, fertility rates drop with a reduction in births of teens and non-White women to be the largest.

“Estimates show that births to non-White women in repeal states (vs states with no law change) fell by 12% just following repeal, more than 3 times the effect on White women’s fertility,” that paper states.

The group also concluded that there was an important connection between the fall of birth rates in states where abortion was accessible vs. states where it was not, “The results indicate that travel between states to obtain abortions was important. Births in repeal states fell by almost 11% relative to births in nonrepeal states more than 750 miles away but only by 4.5% relative to births in states less than 250 miles away and those in states between 250 and 750 miles away,” the authors write.

Interestingly, the paper thanks Jonathan Gruber for providing research assistance, “We thank Jonathan Gruber for comments and Eileen Aguila, David Autor, and Tara Gustafson for outstanding research assistance.”

Abortion decreases welfare

Back to his paper, Abortion and Selection, Gruber repeats the oft heard eugenics reason for abortion, that it reduces welfare.

Gruber and his fellow authors sandwiched their analysis this way, “We found consistent evidence that changes in cohort composition that occurred in the 1970s that can be attributed to greater abortion access led to improved cohort outcomes, particularly in the form of higher rates of college graduation, lower rates of single motherhood, and lower rates of welfare receipt.”

Abortion reduces crime

Gruber and the other authors also conclude among other things that the there is a link between increased abortion access and a reduction of crime.

That theory was perpetuated by John J. Donahue and and Steven D. Levitt in a paper they wrote entitled, “The impact of legalized abortion on crime.”

According to Life News, in Harvard University’s Quarterly Journal of Economics, Donahue and Levitt concluded that “Legalized abortion contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. … Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.” The authors noted, “Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization,” and that the social benefit of this decrease in crime is about $30 billion annually.

Donohue and Levitt wrote that, since 1991 ― 18 years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion ― murder rates have fallen faster than at any time since the end of Prohibition in 1933. They added that the five states that legalized abortion earlier than 1973 [New York, California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska] also experienced earlier declines in crime. Finally, they found that states with especially high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s had equally dramatic crime reductions in the 1990s, Life News reported.

Levitt went on to co-author the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics, in which he reiterated his thesis that the legalization of abortion is responsible for half of the recent drop in violent crime.

Gruber and the others acknowledged Levitt and Donahue’s findings, “Finally, we reconsidered the analysis of abortion and crime originally conducted by Donohue and Levitt to incorporate our updated methodological framework. The results of this analysis support the association between abortion and crime, but suggest that it is difficult to associate their finding with selection as opposed to the direct effect of cohort size.”

Unwanted children are disadvantaged

Gruber’s group finally concludes that “unwanted children” will grow up “disadvantaged” writing, “Most importantly, taken together with earlier results (Gruber, et al., 1999), our findings suggest that the improved living circumstances experienced by the average child born after the legalization of abortion had a lasting impact on the lifelong prospects of these children. Children who were “born unwanted” prior to the legalization of abortion not only grew up in more disadvantaged households, but they also grew up to be more disadvantaged as adults…Overall, our results provide further evidence that abortion is associated with differential selection and its impact is persistent.”

So, if Gruber and his friends can conclude that the fertility rates among “Non-White” women drop substantially when abortion is legal and then claim that a reduction in crime also follows legalized abortion- what subtle messages are they implying?

Since it’s inception, we know that abortion has been a tool for the eugenics movement and we also know clearly – just who- that movement seeks to target.

I may not be an MIT economist, but, I can do the math here – and so can you.