Peter,

Maybe it's a language barrier issue, but as a native English speaker, I hear the problem as this... that statement makes him sound as if he thinks aborting some other racial group's babies would be a viable solution to our crime dilemma, and he hesitates to advocate it but for its repugnancy... damn those pesky morals!

To play devil's advocate to the moral outrage, though, parse his statement further. It's really the "black" part that's so troublesome. Because, on its face, the statement is correct. Aborting any ethnic/racial group's children would reduce the crime rate... even aborting all Caucasian children would reduce the overall crime rate. Criminals, after all, must be born, so if we eliminate a large group of children, regardless of how we choose the group, we'll be eliminating some future criminals.

Of course, this all eventually leads to the question of what is the "crime rate?" Is it the overall number of crimes committed or is it the percentage of people in the populace committing crimes? I think you'd get widely varying opinions on whether or not the percentage stat can really be changed.

>You have not convinced me, on the contrary. Bennet makes it very clear at the end that acting according to such a hypothesis would be very reprehensible. Isn't Freakonomics the title of a book published by some unconventional economists ('statistician' describes them better)? Bennet and the caller were discussing about a finding described in that book: The decrease of crime rate in NY is not caused by the zero-tolerance policy of Rudy Guliani, but happened because 20-30 years earlier abortion was allowed by the Supreme High Court and esp. black single women had made extensive use of it, leading to far less criminal juvenile in the streets.