It's Not Just Obamacare: Gruber Says Abortion Is a Social Good

November 25, 2014 - 9:20 AM

By Dustin Siggins

Over the last three weeks, MIT professor and Affordable Care Act (ACA) architect Jon Gruber has gone from being an academic, known mostly in policy circles, to the face of political dishonesty and manipulation. Gruber, who helped create and sell the ACA to the American people, has been caught on tape admitting – on multiple occasions – that the law was written to mislead the public.

But that's not all that he's done. As originally reported by Jerome Corsi, Gruber is the author of at least two separate reports arguing that legalized abortion has tremendous social benefit. His work also provided some of the foundation for the 2005 book, Freakonomics, which promoted the idea of abortion as a means of improving society's children.

In a 1997 working paper, Gruber and two co-authors argued that "children born immediately after" the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision saw "improved" lives. From the paper:

"The average living circumstances of cohorts of children born immediately after abortion became legalized improved substantially relative to preceding cohorts, and relative to places where the legal status of abortion was not changing," wrote the three co-authors, who compared the five states that had legalized abortion prior to Roe to those who had not. "Our results suggest that the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion legalization would have systematically been born into less favorable circumstances if the pregnancies had not been terminated: they would have been 60 percent more likely to live in a single-parent household, 50 percent more likely to live in poverty, 45 percent more likely to be in a household collecting welfare, and 40 percent more likely to die during the first year of life."

As such, wrote Gruber and his co-authors, the data "impl[ies] that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare expenditures through 1994."

A 2009 version of the paper, also co-authored by Gruber, concluded that "marginal children" saw improved lives, including an "increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent."

Gruber's work wasn't just seen by academics. The 2005 book Freakonomics – co-authored by another supporter of abortion as a social good, Steven Levitt – took its abortion section from Levitt's 2001 paper, "The Impact of Abortion on Crime," which argued that legalized abortion was responsible for a lower crime rate in the 1990s. And Gruber's work greatly influenced that paper.

In the 2001 paper, Levitt and co-author John Donohue cited Gruber's work on at least three occasions, calling the final 1999 paper "most similar to ours, [which] document[s] that the early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difficult along many dimensions: infant mortality, growing up in a single-parent family, and experiencing poverty." They also note that "previous research has found that an adverse family environment is strongly linked to future criminality" – and Gruber's paper was all about "adverse family environments."

Read more: http://cnsnews.com/commentary/dustin-sig...ion-social-good