Instead of writing the next chapter of the book I’m working on, as I should be, I am playing We Rule and studying statistics and demographic data from various nations around the world. I’m not exactly sure how this began, but somehow or another, I ended up in databases and that started my research.
In other words, in 1990, the abortion rate compared to the population base was 0.0064257. Twenty years later, it was 0.003883495. So even though overall abortions fell 25% in absolute numbers, relative to the population, the abortion rate has collapsed by almost 39.56%. That is, relative to the population rate, Americans are having almost 40% fewer abortions today than they were in 1990. Of these, 13% consist of the “morning after” pill which counts as an abortion even if the woman isn’t pregnant and is taking it as a precautionary measure. That means that the real abortion rate is even lower because common sense tells us that not 100% of the women who take RU486 are, in fact, pregnant.
Who Are The Women Having These Abortions?
According to the Kaiser Foundation, 73% of abortions are performed on women 29 years or younger.
Economists Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt in their bestselling book Freakonomics posit that the dramatic decline in crime in the United States is due to the high abortion rate in the African American community because poverty and lack of educational achievement, which are disproportionately represented in the black population, are directly correlated with criminal conviction; when Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court, the next generation from this block of society was effectively truncated, for lack of a better term, which explains the 1990-onward nosedive of violence. There are conspiracy theories based around the notion that abortion rights were a way to severely restrict the growth in the total African Americans in the United States over time, effectively keeping control in the hands of rich, white men.
Even more shocking is the fact that despite being only 12.4% of the population, African Americans were responsible for 35% of abortions in 2006 (the most recent racial component breakdown I could find).
That means that the African American segment of the United States is aborting the next generation at a rate nearly 3x what their demographic distribution alone would suggest. There are numerous reasons, the likely culprits being the lower overall educational attainment (including sex education), access to health services, poverty, etc. that have plagued the minority establishment for generations.
The numbers are disproportionately high in areas with large poverty rates, such as Alabama, where African Americans had 56% of abortions, while making up 26% of the population (see source). This would make sense when you consider what I wrote about a few weeks ago, explaining that the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was an “unequal” recession with the unemployment rate for college graduates at only 5% but for African American men at nearly 30%. In other words, abortion is a symptom of societal demographics, not just a cause. It’s a two-way street.
This would explain why the African American segment of the United States is being eclipsed by Hispanics and other races. This has not been without tension; witness the rash of news stories, such as the CNN special a few years ago, which talk about the frustration among black leaders in regards to Hispanic immigrants achieving greater prosperity and education in one or two generations than the African American community has in two centuries.
The opposite side of the Janus coin also reveals itself: The white population in the United States represents 75% of people yet only 53.6% of abortions due, again, to higher educational attainment, greater household net worth, and other factors that are associated with better family planning and healthcare.
A Change In Socio-Economic Mores
A lot of what I am reading attributes the rapid change in the willingness to have an abortion to shifting socio-economic mores, which basically translates into the “morality” to which a society holds itself.
That means that the nation has grown more secular yet crime has decreased, abortions have decreased, and household purchasing power has increased in real terms over the past 20 years. This is one of the reasons I am baffled by the “take our country back” crowd.
Things have never been so good, despite all of our problems.
If you are interested in learning more about health statistics, check out the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Related posts:
- Surprising Facts About America’s Population
- Thoughts About the United States Population and the Population of the World
- Graphic: Teen Pregnancy and Abortion Rates Collapsed Over the Past 30+ Years
- Surprising But True: America Still Manufactures the Same Percentage of World Goods as It Did More than 21 Years Ago
- Educational Crisis In Black Male Population Resulting in Staggering 25% to 40% Unemployment Rate
- Understanding American Politics Through a United States Cartogram
- Going on Safari in the Animal Kingdom, North America’s Largest African Wildlife Preserve
- Standards of Living and Individual Freedom Sucked in Colonial America
- If the Death Penalty Is In the Constitution, then the Death Penalty Cannot Be Ruled Unconstitutional If You Are Intellectually Honest
- Which Supreme Court Justice Are You? (I’m Anthony Kennedy)
I'm a private investor who loves architecture, furniture, clothes, history, philosophy, books, cooking, and music as much as I do finance. 
