Digby sees more and more liberals running from their traditional role of protecting abortion rights.

Before they throw the right not to have babies out with the bathwater, maybe they should read a little Freakonomics:

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime.

In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.

People are imperfect, and abortion is not a tasteful option for everyone. But don’t we have a better world when women aren’t forced to choose between unsafe abortion methods and raising children they are unprepared to offer anything better than neglect?

If those who would ban abortion gave a damn about helping solve poverty, about providing healthcare to all, about providing high-quality social services, about ending the badly backfiring War on Drugs, and so on, maybe we’d have that idealized country where every child would have a proper home to look forward to. Until that day, many pregnant women face a painful choice, one that will become more painful if the Left won’t stand up and fight for an important, if controversial, right.