Priviliged Knowledge

A general principle of philosophers regarding "knowledge" is that experimentation is the only means to knowledge. In an ideal open scientific world, results of experimentation, after scrutiny by experts in the field gets disseminated as knowledge in texts etc. However, what if you want to know the financial structure of criminal gangs? The book Freakonomics touches on such subjects, where unusual circumstances allow information that is normally out of bounds to scientific scrutiny, to be studied - often revealing useful knowledge. As a marconomic principle "privileged knowledge" is the range of knowledge that can be *known* by someone, is based on at least rudimentary experiment and observation, but due to issues of dissemination will never be freely available. Everyone with few exception has access to knowledge of this kind. Frustration may be felt that if dissemination is attempted, it will either not be believed due to lack of proof, or the proof of same will result in related legal issues, financial loss, social outcasting or at least any fear of any combination of these. This concept of privileged knowledge is not the same as the more general concept of "privacy". Although every conceivable privileged knowledge can have a future where it would be publicly accessible, information science excludes the possibility of any human knowing every relevant information on another human. Thus an imbalance of information is impossible to avoid - thus there will always be privileged information available to be exploited regardless on how complete the erosion of privacy is.

As a random example, place yourself in the boots of someone performing terminations in the 1960's. Due to being illegal, terminations on the black market were very pricey, but available. One may find that he/she would have detailed knowledge of the demographic of those having terminations in their own country as well as neighbouring countries where it was legal. I would suspect that the great majority of those having terminations where it was illegal would have been high income earners having them for convenience reasons. Those in desperate social or economic situations would not afford them. The unborn-baby-killers could know themselves whether it would make the country's demographic direction unsustainable, but policymakers would have absolutely no access to this knowledge or how much they could do about it. Policy-makers and voters alike often run with blind sentiment because the information that is out there has a natural resistance to dissemination.

Abortion
As an aside, the trick with policy-makers that would both like to make terminations rarer and move along a moral path that equates them towards a stance where the law can equate it with murder is multi-faceted. One key is to encourage voluntary registration of pregnancies linked to earlier family payments(and/or tax benefits): As far as I know, this has not been tried in any country yet. Another key is to note that extensive early family planning education and universal health benefits are policy aspect of countries where they are rarer. Knowledge about cause and effect of policy changes ought to be a science in these kinds of issues, but it depends a great deal on priviliged knowledge. Governments have had improved immunisation rates with linking family benefits with it - There is no reason to believe that similar incentives would not break the democratic resistance to pregnancy registrations. Pregnancy registrations are an absolute pre-requisite for considering them anywhere towards as we do babies.