that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn. But lets consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with ei- ther person number one or person number two, the following exercise might strike you as offensive, and you may want to skip this para- graph and the next.) This third person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Lets say that he is forced, for the sake of ar- gument, to affix a relative value, and he decides that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses. There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the United States every year. For a person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million abortions would translate-dividing 1.5 million by 100-into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides in the United States every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to le- galized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one one-hundredth of a human being, the trade-off be- tween higher abortion and lower crime is, by an economists reckon- ing, terribly inefficient. What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own de- cision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she cant, she often chooses the abortion. But once a woman decides she will have her baby, a pressing ques- tion arises: what are parents supposed to do once a child is born?