If the "Personhood" Amendment makes it to the ballot this fall, voters should be aware of the unintended consequences that will follow.

The Amendment's goal is to nullify the Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion nationwide back in 1973. Opponents dramatically refer to the time since then as a "holocaust," claiming that 43 million children have not been born because of this law. They picture these as all bubbling, healthy Gerber babies cruelly aborted by unfeeling women.

Most of us recognize, of course, that many of these abortions were medically necessary, preventing maternal deaths or lifetime impairments. We know, also, that the lives of desperate women, unable to face an unplanned pregnancy, were saved when abortion became a fully legal, safe medical procedure.

However, another result of legalized abortion goes largely unrecognized by the general public, and it is something that affects all our lives, regardless of our opinion about abortion.

To understand, we need to look at the latter part of the 20th Century. As described in "Freakonomics," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, crime had been rising relentlessly. By the early 1990's, violence had become commonplace -- death by gunfire, carjackings, crack dealing, robbery and rape. Media wrote about the thousands of so-called superpredators, described as scrawny, big-city teenagers with a cheap gun in their hands and nothing in their heart but ruthlessness.

Everyone expected it to only grow worse. A 1995 report for the U.S. attorney general grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers, forecasting a rise in rate of teen homicides between 15 percent and 100 percent over the next decade.

This sentiment was shared by other criminologists, political scientists and even President Clinton, who said, "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around, or our country is going to be living with chaos."

But then, surprisingly, the crime rate began to fall. It continued decreasing each year, and with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. By the year 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years, as had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.

Experts were baffled. Some credited the roaring 1990s economy, or the proliferation of gun control laws, even innovative policing strategies in New York City, for the crime drop, even though none of these applied equally across the country or to all crimes.

One factor, however, explains it all, once you consider that decades of studies have shown that criminal activities are often the consequence of a bad home environment where unwanted children are neglected or abused. For the previous twenty years, since the Roe decision had legalized abortion, millions of women were no longer forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers, for whom illegal abortions had previously been too expensive or too difficult to obtain, were not having as many children -- children who would have been the most likely to become criminals.

Wanted children had made the difference. Today society seeks to achieve this goal through effective and affordable contraception along with good sex education, with abortion retained for backup.

The Personhood Amendment would make abortion and many contraceptives illegal, reversing all these advances.

Janet Brazill    May 2008