A frequently raised justification for abortion’s legality by pro-choice advocates is the claim that abortion significantly reduces crime and homicide rates, saving lives and bettering our society as a whole.
Spawned in large part by a paper written by Donohue and Levitt in The Quarterly Journal of Economics showing that legalized abortion contributed significantly to crime reductions, the theory itself isn’t all that absurd. The premise is essentially that if the lives of people who might be more inclined to potentially commit crimes sometime in the future are terminated before they can do so, then there will be less crime, which on it’s face seems sensible enough.
Despite how intuitive this theory might initially seem however, extensive research spurred by Levitt’s assertions has been done on this subject by a large number of researchers and has been published in a host of different peer reviewed journals pretty thoroughly disproving this theory.
Researchers have approached and examined this issue in a multitude of different ways in their efforts to prove or disprove this theory. Research by Ted Joyce in The Journal of Human Resources for example compared changes in the homicide and arrest rates among cohorts that were exposed to early legalized abortion through states that legalized abortion prior to Roe v. Wade and those that were not, finding little consistent evidence that the legalization of abortion had an effect on crime, either in specific states or the nation as a whole following Roe v. Wade. (1) (2)
Some in their attempts to investigate the purported link between abortion and crime chose to examine the drastic changes in abortion rates between 1971 and 1974, which varied greatly by state and had a significant effect on fertility. They compared changes in homicide rates before and after legalization of abortion within states by single year of age, and made separate estimates for whites and blacks because the effect of legalized abortion had such a drastically larger effect on the fertility rates of blacks, creating good conditions for comparisons.
While crime rates should have fallen drastically as these post-legalization cohorts reached their late teens and early 20s, the peak ages of criminal involvement, they did not, and there was little racial difference in the reduction in crime. Overall, their thorough examinations of homicide rates found very little evidence that legalized abortion contributed to any reduction in crime.(3)
Overall examinations of trends in youth violence also showed that crime trends were completely out of sync with what should have been observed if abortion was the cause of the decrease, and the timing of the downturn is quite simply just not in line with the idea that legalized abortion was the driving force. Moreover, even though a larger percentage of pregnancies by black women were aborted following legalization than for women of other races, increases in crime were greatest for black youths during the time period.(4)
Similar research using aggregate and cross-country data demonstrated that abortions likely couldn’t have been responsible for much of the fluctuations in crime rates, and that data from many other countries, such as Denmark, Finland, Poland, and others, actually show that greater abortion is generally correlated with greater crime in those countries. In others, like Japan and Norway, crime was falling before legalization and did not decline any more quickly after, and only a handful, like Canada and Italy produce data that would be in any way consistent with Donohue and Levitt hypotheses.(5)
Researchers from these countries who have examined this issue however have generally shown through their attempts to test for a link between abortion and crime in their countries that any purported relationship between abortion and crime can’t be proven or endorsed, such as with Guido Citoni’s examination of Italian data.(6)
Many have attempted in one form or another to replicate Donohue and Levitt’s results and then further analyze them. One such piece of research, examining age-specific crime rates and examining cross-cohort differences in exposure to legalized abortion, as well as investigating state changes in abortion rates before and after Roe, demonstrated that there was no meaningful association between abortion and age-specific crime rates. Another paper replicating the negative association between abortion and crime examining England and Wales showed that when any real scrutiny is applied to this theory, any purported association breaks down entirely. (7) (8)
As time has gone on, Donohue and Levitt have continued to publish papers defending their theories, but most academic research has tended to contradict their conclusions. Not only has their research been in conflict with that of their peers however, but alongside the mountains of evidence against their theories many scholars in several journals and papers have pointed out severe flaws and errors in much of Donohue and Levitt’s research.
One example of this is an article by Foote and Goetz which pointed out in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics that Donohue and Levitt made mistakes in their calculation that, when accounted for, produces much weaker results, and that other parts of their research, such as cross-state comparisons, had their own problems that made the conclusions of the research highly questionable.(9)
Others like Ted Joyce have demonstrated that there are small but important errors in Levitt’s work, from seven out of ten of the multiplicative factors they use in their research having incorrect or flipped signage to using unreliable and flawed methods to account for measurement errors.(10)
Another critique by the Foote and Goetz also showed that the actual implementation of Donohue and Levitt’s statistical tests differed from and was inconsistent with what they described, and that when more variables are take into account, any evidence of greater criminal inclinations among youths who would have grown up to be adults vanishes.(11)
As time has gone on, more and more major holes in Levitt’s calculations and assumptions have been identified in his papers, and the situation is even worse when it comes to his books where he has championed this theory. Some, such as Professor John DiNardo, have described the work of Levitt and Freakonomics as being more about entertainment than anything else, and have heavily criticized Levitt for misrepresenting the substance of other’s papers in his book, if not outright making claims about the conclusions of people’s research that is virtually the opposite of what was actually found in regards to abortion and crime.(12) (13) (14)
Now, there has been a very limited number of studies done by researchers other than Levitt that purports to show a link between abortion and crime. One such study by Charles and Stephens for example found that the legalization of abortion was associated with decreases in substance use, but while not flawed, such research has been rather limited in scope, at least in comparison to some of the other studies discussed here. (15) (16)
Ultimately, there is very little solid evidence to indicate that abortion decreases crime, and many of the claims made claims made by pro-choice advocates in this regard are tenuous at best, and have most commonly been solidly refuted by the academic community.
The case for abortion on the basis of it’s impact upon crime gets even worse however when one recognizes that while abortion may not decrease crime, it may well increase it.
The legalization of abortion in the 1970s essentially led to the idea that one could have consequence free sexual usage of women’s bodies. Before the legalization, it was assumed that if you got a girl pregnant, you married her so that you could take care of her and the child, and that was that. Abortion however made this no longer seem necessary, for if a woman got pregnant the assumption was that she would simply abort the child. This however is not always consistent with how people behave in the real world however, and as a result we have seen skyrocketing out of wedlock births to mothers who had no one to help them care for their children.(17)
It is no great secret that being raised in single parent homes increases the odds of living in poverty and the risk that one might commit crimes greatly. Research examining these increases in out-of-wedlock births and the effects of abortion on single motherhood, as well as using more direct age specific data on criminals provides consistent and significant evidence that the legalization of abortion did not decrease crimes at all, but likely increased murders by over 7%, and resulted in multi-billion dollar increases in annual victimization costs.(18)(19)
In short, given the research we have, the claim that abortion decreases crime rates is unlikely to be accurate. What little evidence there is that indicates abortion decreases crime has generally been shown by other professionals in the field to be flawed, and other in depth research has not produced similar same results. Indeed, some studies have instead demonstrated that abortion may well increase crime rates.
Even if abortion did decrease crime however, to kill someone for a crime that they might commit is as illogical and unethical as it sounds, and if we really believed that the chance that someone might grow up to be a criminal is reason enough to end their lives, we’d be terminating the lives of any high risk individuals, whether born or not.
Sources
- Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime? Journal of Human Resources, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, 2004.
- Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime? National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 8319, 2001.
- Further Tests of Abortion and Crime (Full Text) National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 10564, 2004.
- After the Epidemic: Recent Trends in Youth Violence in the United States National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 8571, 2001.
- What Do Economists Know About Crime? National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 13759, 2008.
- [Abortion and crime] Medicina nei secoli, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2011.
- A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 91, No. 1, 2009.
- The Abortion–Crime Link: Evidence from England and Wales Economica, Vol. 75, No. 297, 2008.
- The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 123, No. 1, 2008.
- Further Tests of Abortion and Crime: A Response to Donohue and Levitt (2001,2004, 2006) National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 12607, 2006.
- Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt SSRN, 2005.
- A Review of Freakonomics Author manuscript, December 10, 2005.
- Freakonomics: Scholarship in the Service of Storytelling American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2006.
- Interesting Questions in Freakonomics Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4, 2007.
- Abortion and Crime: A Review National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 15098, 2009.
- Abortion Legalization and Adolescent Substance Use The Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2006.
- An analysis of out-of-wedlock births in the United States Brookings Policy Brief Series, August 1, 1996.
- Abortion and crime: unwanted children and out‐of‐wedlock births Economic Inquiry, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2007.
- Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births John M. Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy Working Papers, No. 254, May 2001.
