On the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, our own thoughts run less to the legal and constitutional differences of opinion than to the question of population. After all, as a constitutional matter, Roe v. Wade may falter when it discerns in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights a right to privacy and therefore to an abortion. But if the constitutional conservatives were to gain their way and the courts were to return to the legislatures the power to act, it wouldn’t be surprising to see abortion legalized through the state assemblies or the Congress. Even if some day Roe v. Wade is overturned, it’s hard to imagine an outright ban on abortions passing in New York; we certainly wouldn’t support one. It is possible to imagine that abortion could become rare, and that would be a better situation.

It has been diminishing on its own in recent years. In New York City there were 94,466 “induced terminations of pregnancy” in 2000, according to the city health department. In 1999, the city reported 102,334 abortions to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which keeps such statistics; in 1998, New York City had 103,982. Some of those are no doubt cases of rape, incest, or where the life or health of the mother is at stake. Others result no doubt from a poor, unmarried young woman deciding with her doctor, her parents, and her boyfriend that she’s not ready to have a child and not ready to spend nine months carrying around a fe tus and to go through the pain of childbirth to hand over a baby for adoption. Some may be decided on by a married woman in consultation with her husband.

Whatever brings these decisions, it’s hard not to be staggered by the loss to New York in terms of the human capital that these numbers represent. If one adds up simply the number of black children aborted in New York City in 1998, 1999, and 2000 — 49,642; 49,314; and 45,150 — one can see it’s enough to, say, swing an election. Include the 1997 number, and you’d have more than the entire total population of Providence, R.I., or Salt Lake City, Utah. Imagine the businesses that the persons born of such pregnancies might have started, the books they might have written, and the scientific discoveries they might have made. The total number of live births in New York City in 2000 was only 125,563, so the abortions account for a significant portion of what would otherwise be the city’s desperately needed population growth. In the Bronx in 2000 there were more abortions — 21,757 — than there were live births — 21,547.

One of the best indications of New York City’s success in the decade from 1990 to 2000 is that its population grew, to 8 million from 7.3 million. There are those who would argue that the city’s population grew because the economic boom and the successes in crime-fighting made the city a popular destination for immigrants. No doubt that is partially the case. But we’d also argue that the city’s economic boom was in part the result of its population growth. People, after all, are a resource whose creativity and productivity create economic activity and growth. It’s no accident that some of the cities in the world that are most crowded with people — New York, Hong Kong, London — are among its most productive economically. It seems to us on the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling that the missing element of the debate is support for policy measures that would nurture as a matter of policy the building of families and the expansion of our population so that fewer pregnancies would be unwanted.