University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and Stanford law professor John Donohue III have authored an unpublished study which suggests that legalized abortion in the early 1970s contributed to a drop in crime a generation later.

The theory is that “unwanted” children—those more likely to have been aborted—would have been more prone to become criminals, had they lived. High rates of abortion in 1970s minority and poor communities, the authors say, led to the lower crime rates in the 1990s.

The study has made people on both sides of the abortion debate uncomfortable. Many abortion supporters would prefer to paint abortion as a woman's choice, not as a publicized means for keeping down the number of poor and minority kids. For many abortion opponents, on the other hand, the study brings to mind the racist mentality of eugenics advocate Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

For us, the study is a reminder that abortion advocacy didn't originate from confusion about when life begins. It originated from white fears of a growing underclass. We wonder how often that continues to be the unspoken motive of today's pro-abortion efforts worldwide.

Yet two things are clear: first, that many forms of crime have decreased during America's abortion era; and second, that the most heinous crimes have increased dramatically.

As criminologist John DiIulio and William Bennett show in their book Body Count: Moral Poverty—and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, the crimes that are committed are often much worse in degree and kind. Today's criminals are likely to have very little remorse and very little conscience about what they do, argue DiIulio and Bennett. The Columbine High School massacre is a glaring example.

Such behavior is a consequence of the breakdown in the moral order that, in turn, has been brought about by another category of crime—one that breaks every moral code from the Ten Commandments to the Hippocratic oath. It is abortion.

In a nation that allows more than a million unborn children to be slaughtered every year, is it any wonder that criminals will take lives on a large scale too, as at Columbine?

The Levitt/Donohue study has it wrong. Crimes haven't decreased because of abortion; they have shifted. The victims are no longer just people in the streets, but unborn children in the womb.

Euthanasia for the Young

A plan allowing children as young as 12 to request and receive “mercy killing” is expected to gain parliamentary approval next year in the Netherlands.

The guidelines only require that the patient make a voluntary and “informed” request, and be suffering “irremediable” and “unbearable” pain after exhausting all other medical options.

Mercy killing, or euthanasia, is often associated with the very old, and public revulsion at the thought of doctors killing their patients can be tempered by the consideration that the victims at least have lived full lives. But the prospect of mercy killing of the young reveals what is at the root of the euthanasia mind-set: a lack of appreciation for the value of all human life.

When a nation puts preconditions on the value of life—be it for the sake of “compassion” or just plain convenience—it leaves no foundation for life to stand on.

How can we reverse this trend? By reminding the world in a thousand ways of the absolute value of life—a value not based on what we can do or how we feel, but on who made us, and why.

The Jubilee Shroud

It seems appropriate that, on the eve of the Jubilee celebrations of Christ's birth, new evidence suggests that devotees of the Shroud of Turin may have been right all along. The shroud may very well be the burial cloth of Christ.

A decade ago, officials who had conducted carbon testing said the linen cloth could not have been around before the year 1260. Now, scientists say that the image and bloodstains on the cloth seem to be made by the body of a Palestinian man before the eighth century. The man was buried in the customary Jewish way, and his body strewn with flowers found in the Jerusalem area.

The authenticity of the shroud would, of course, have no bearing whatsoever on the Christian faith. We already have all the evidence we need of Christ's passion, death and resurrection in Scripture and in the reality of the Church.

The Gospel accounts of Christ's life were reported by weak men who were constantly in need of correction and rebuke by their leader, and who fled him in Gethsemane. The apostles seem incapable of faithfully following Jesus, let alone creating a religion that would sweep the world. Something happened that drew them together and changed them after Christ's death.

What Pope John Paul II has called the “silent testimony” of the shroud can give hope to Catholics in today's culture of death. On our own we cannot overcome the immense problems of our time. But with the one who died and rose from the dead, all things are possible.