Last week, Bill Bennett repeated a remark that stated if black babies were aborted more frequently, we would have fewer crimes; such an atrocity, however, would be morally reprehensible. Are blacks inherently inclined to commit crimes? No; skin color is nothing more than a feature, another characteristic that adds to our uniqueness. Environment, on the other hand, has everything to do with how people behave and Bill, to some extent, is right.

There’s deep segregation in a lot of cities – blacks huddle together in the center while many whites spread further into the suburbs. The poorest of the poor reside in the inner city with horrible living conditions, crappy public high schools, drugs and violence, gang wars and an ineffective, if not corrupt, police force. Although there are Hispanics and whites who live in these areas, many of them are predominantly black.

Bennett is not a racist, nor does he want any babies aborted. He simply did a horrible job of explaining his position. People in this nation do not understand that skin color means nothing more than height. Blacks have traditionally been a big part of inner city life and many never make it out. It is the social environment, not skin color, that causes these problems.

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, once wrote, “stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them.” She was an avid supporter of population control and birth prevention for the “unfit.” By her definition, the unfit would include a large number of blacks in America; as 12 percent of our population, they constitute 32 percent of abortions – largely because of Sanger’s efforts.

Steven Levitt, economist and author of “Freakonomics,” argues that the introduction of the Roe v. Wade court decision is a main factor in the dramatic decrease of crime in the 1990s. It has been suggested that in the earliest years after Roe, an aborted child was 50 percent more likely to be born in poverty, and 60 percent more likely to live in a single-parent home. The highly controversial Supreme Court case was decided in 1973. In the early 1990s, the aborted would have been somewhere between 16 and 25 – the most likely age of a criminal.

There are other theories that could explain the crime drop, but most of them are easily disproved. The increased use of capital punishment is one of them, although it only could deter the most violent of all crimes. The unemployment rate, which only dropped by a percentage point or two, might explain financially-motivated crimes such as robbery. A 14 percent per capita increase of the police force may have been a factor, but was also thrown out when studies compared cities that increased their force with those who didn’t – the numbers stayed the same.

Despite compelling evidence that Roe curtailed our crime problem, Levitt still concludes that abortion is not an effective way to reduce crime. Consider the 15 million abortions in the United States each year. Assuming one human life is equal to a number as liberal as 100 fetuses, the equivalent loss of life is still 15,000 – the number of homicides we already suffer each year. Why a 100:1 ratio? It’s a happy medium; the most ardent of the pro-abortion crowd would argue that no number of fetuses equal a human life, while the other side insists a fetus is a life.

Through monetization, or the process of affixing a common value to something less tangent, it is easy to see that education and charity are much more efficient institutions than abortion. Programs such as school vouchers have shown results in New York City, Dayton, Washington D.C. and Madison by giving thousands the opportunity to go to private schools to make something of their lives.

It is Sanger and Planned Parenthood, not Bennett, who have destructive views on blacks and abortion. Sure, aborting black babies, or even poor white babies, would cut down on crime. The conversation this should have sparked is one about the efficiency of institutions. It shows the conservative ideals of education vouchers are much more compassionate than genocide through abortion.

– Aaron Gott is a sophomore in political science from South Amana.