“Where have all the criminals gone?” is the title of the fourth chapter of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s 2005 book, “Freakonomics.” The economists correlate the banning of reproductive health care with incidents of future violence. The first case is of the Romanian dictator who banned sex ed, contraception and abortions in 1966. Twenty-three years of misery led the populace to violent rebellion with the dictator and his wife, put before a firing squad in 1989. In reverse, the U.S. saw a drop in violent crime in the 1990s, over 17 years past the decision Roe v. Wade. Violent crime dropped 40%.

In 2001, a politician instituted a gag order and others created ban after ban on women’s access to reproductive health care and self-governing free citizenship. Unplanned children forced into the world have been denied care by the dead-beat politicians and groomed for failure to become prison fodder, cheap labor fodder and cannon fodder for lucrative profit for industry. America has stumbled into violence. The online service Statistica revealed in its March 2023 study that in 2018, mass shootings spiked and continued doing so. This was 17 years after politicians began their bans.

Do we really want to end violence? The First Amendment and the 14th Amendment must be honored. Our first step is to ban the politicians controlling access to reproductive health care, and punishing women and children with an unfunded mandate for misery, suicide rates, homelessness, broken foster care systems and violence.

Stephanie Johnson

Hesperus