Georgia's latest embarrassment: It hasn’t gotten widespread play yet, but former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller made a little news this week in Macon when he declared that abortion has contributed to the military’s manpower shortage, the Social Security crisis, and the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.

“How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years? Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We’re too few because too many of our babies have been killed,” Miller said.

“Over 45 million since Roe v. Wade in 1973. If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security,” the former Georgia governor said. “Still, we watch as 3,700 babies are killed every single day in America. It is unbelievable that a nation under God would allow this.”

If you doubt me, check out the video at the Macon Telegraph’s web site. The comments were made at a Tuesday night fund-raiser for a local anti-abortion counseling center.

But let's crunch the numbers on this a little bit. According to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of Freakanomics, since 1980 the number of abortions in the U.S. has been 1.6 million per year, or one for every 2.25 live births. In a country of 225 million people, 1.6 million abortions per year is one per every 140 Americans. According to Levitt and Dubner:

Before Roe v. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middle- or upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often for less than $100.

What sore of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors - childhood poverty and a single-family household - are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.

In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.

Now, one other option available to those born into conditions of poverty other than a life of crime is military service, so Zell is correct in that, had these 45 million births occurred since 1973, the number enlisted in the services would undoubtedly have been greater. But are the number of available troops really the problem, or is it a Commander in Chief who has over committed the troops to an endless war?

Zell is incorrect in that America's poor are not now filling the jobs that are otherwise going to illegal immigrants, and 45 million Americans wouldn't do anything to make conditions south of the border any better. So one can't blame illegal immigration on Roe v. Wade. If one really wanted to slow the tide of illegal immigration, one would work on improving prospects and conditions in Mexico, and not complaining about "outsourcing" or NAFTA.

And 45 million more Americans living in poverty, or even half that number, wouldn't have solved the Social Security crisis either. The additional demands that would have been placed on the Welfare system, the criminal justice system and the educational system would have more than offset any benefits from the Social Security wages of the poor. The problem with Social Security, of course, is that Americans are living longer than anticipated and demanding more of the entitlements to which they are owed.

State Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R-Turnerville), who has become an ideological ally of Zell on the abortion issue, made a similar statement almost exactly a year ago, but backed off upon press inquiries. Somehow, I don’t think Zell’s inclined to throw himself in reverse.