The D.C. Body Count is Much Worse than it Seems
Is Washington, D.C. unacceptably dangerous, or is it not? You can add this to the long list of questions currently dividing Americans. President Trump says, yes, and has deployed federal personnel in an attempt to reign in the violence. His detractors say no and insist this is just the next stage in his relentless march towards authoritarianism. The left, you’ll remember, hates federal overreach (or they at least hate Donald Trump). Republicans can point to dataindicating that Washington, D.C. is among the least safe cities in the world, and Democrats can point to data indicating that D.C. crime has decreased dramatically.
The problem with crime statistics, as Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi reminded us last week, is that they can be manipulated to communicate almost anything. Walter recalled doing a story for Time magazine which required him to monitor police scanners in Billings, Montana, for weeks on end. Each night he’d hear harrowing call outs for robberies and assaults, and each day he’d notice that virtually none of it was reported. “The city was engaged in promoting itself as a safe place to live,” Kirn observed, because “it’s important to reassure the tourists that they’re coming to a safe city.” Another reason real crime is underreported, Taibbi added, is because officers are frequently incentivized to ignore the most serious threats. When you’re instructed to stop x number of people or issue x number of citations, the natural tendency is to go after citizens who are less likely to harm or kill you. “When you look at crime stats,” he advises, “only look at the stuff they can’t cover up—which is bodies.”
The real debate isn’t about whether or not Washington, D.C. is safe. It’s not. Even CNN admits it is among the most dangerous cities in the world—though they warn against being so fixated on body counts (perhaps their priorities are not the same as Matt Taibbbi’s). The real debate centers on whether or not Trump has the authority to do anything about violence in the capital. One side insists he doesn’t; the other says crime in D.C. has reached emergency proportions. Trump vowed in a recent press conference to “liberate our capital from bloodshed,” but the problem as I see it is this. Even if the homicide rate in D.C. miraculously fell to zero, it would still have a rather staggering bloodshed problem.
The Guttmacher Institute began as the research arm of Planned Parenthood and continues to do all it can to normalize the poisoning and dismemberment of unborn children. Though I might prefer to ignore their work altogether, the state of California has made that a practical impossibility. That’s because California—along with Maryland and New Hampshire—does not publicly report abortion data. So the U.S. abortion statistics released each year by the CDC do not include the state that kills more babies in the womb than any other. For decades now, Guttmacher’s state-by-state abortion estimates have been our only window into the state of abortion in the state of California. But this year, Guttmacher did something it’s never done before. It published abortion estimates for back-to-back years. And though I’ve called into question the veracity of their 2023 estimates—their first in post-Roe America, their 2024 iteration at least gives us a trend line. And the trend line for D.C. is abysmal.
Guttmacher reports that in 2024, 10,260 abortions took place in Washington, D.C. What Guttmacher doesn’t tell you is that during that same year, 7,601 babies were born in Washington, D.C. Go ahead and look at those numbers again: 7,601 births against 10,260 abortions. In other words, if we exclude miscarriages, 57% of D.C. pregnancies ended in abortion last year. By comparison, 31% of California pregnancies ended in abortion in 2024. Nationwide, it was 22%.
The second-highest 2024 abortion percentage belongs to New Mexico, where 47% of pregnancies ended in abortion. But that is a bit misleading since almost 70% of the abortions performed in New Mexico were on out-of-state residents—mostly from Texas. Texas being a big state and New Mexico a small state, you can see how even a modest influx from Texas would grossly inflate New Mexico’s numbers. If we looked at the two states together, we would find that only 4% of the pregnancies in New Mexico and Texas ended in abortion. But D.C. doesn’t have anything like the same excuse. It is not bordered by a single state where abortion is illegal.
Abortion rates are admittedly higher in cities than states, and D.C. is closer to the former than the latter, and yet there are still no comps for its staggering abortion rate. Fifteen years ago, I released a T-shirt for Abort73 that read, “In NYC, 41% Don’t Make it Out Alive”—referring to the fact that 41% of pregnancies in New York City ended in abortion. That number turned a lot of heads because 41% is preposterously high. We don’t yet have a 2024 number for New York City. The best we can do is 2022, when 33% of NYC pregnancies ended in abortion. That is still abhorrent, but it is less abhorrent than 57%. The abortion rate in D.C.—which is the number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 is 53.6. That’s three and a half times the national average and up from 32.7 just 10 years ago. It is more than twice the abortion rate of California.
If the District of Columbia were a state—as the Democratic Party wants to make it, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation and the highest abortion rate too. And it wouldn’t be close. That itself reveals an inconvenient truth because it has long been asserted in elite circles that higher abortion rates lead to lower crime rates. I’ve talked about this before, but the basic assertion floated by the book Freakonomics is that abortion disproportionately eliminates the kinds of people who disproportionately commit most crimes. If that doesn’t strike you as sinister, let me say the quiet part out loud by reminding you who abortion disproportionately targets. That would be poor minority babies.
As leftists across the nation decry the “white supremacy” of Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle, they line up to celebrate an institution that kills black children and poor children en masse. To wit, black women in America are five times more likely to have an abortion than white women and women on Medicaid are three times more likely to have an abortion than women who aren’t. The introduction of legal abortion a half century ago was billed as a social boon, but it has not led to better outcomes for the tens of millions of children who’ve been killed by abortion, nor for the hundreds of millions who managed to survive. And now in the nation’s capital, the number of children who are killed by abortion exceeds the number of children who are born.
President Trump said earlier this month that D.C.’s 2023 homicide rate of 41 homicides per 100,000 people was the highest they could find in the world. PolitiFact disputes that, asserting that there are 49 cities in the world more dangerous than D.C. But I’m less concerned about its global rank than I am with what its homicide rate actually means—which is a point I raised back in 2017 when Caracas, Venezuela, had the highest homicide rate in the world at 120 per 100,000 and St. Louis had the highest homicide rate in America at 60. Here’s the point. For the born residents of Washington, D.C. during the crime spike of 2023, there was a .04% chance they’d be killed by homicide. But for the unborn residents of Washington, D.C. in 2024, there was a 57% chance they’d be killed by abortion. The first number is regarded as unacceptably high crime. The second is regarded as a perfectly acceptable personal choice. So if you want to talk about a truly existential bloodshed problem, there it is.