Legalized abortion and lower crime rates
Will Sachs
The original study by Donohue and Levitt, The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, focuses on the fall in crime during the 1990s in America. 1 Since the early 1980s, US crime rates had been steadily rising, peaking in 1991 with 758 violent crimes reported per 100,000 people. 2 In fact, crime had risen by roughly 80% over the 15-year period 1975-90, partly fuelled by a crack cocaine epidemic that had engulfed the country. 3 Even experts, worried that the nation was hurtling towards a Darwinist descent into anarchy, began to warn of impending disaster – for example, John Dilulio, a political scientist, predicted that juvenile crime would triple by 2010. 4 This never materialized. Instead, according to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Office, there were just 720,000 juvenile arrests in 2018, declining from over 2,000,000 thirty years earlier. 5 This drop in criminal activity occurred for all age groups and all across the country. As the graph below depicts, reported levels of violent crime in the United States plunged, going from above 750 per 100,000 in 1991 to around 500 per 100,000 a decade later. 6
A range of ideas were proposed in an attempt to explain this development such as: an ageing population means less youths and less crime since youths are more likely to commit crimes; innovative policing strategies to mitigate crime; improved security measures to deter would-be criminals; a strong economy or even the idea that exposure to lead at a young age increased violent and hyperactive behaviour. However, nobody really knew the answer, with Eric Monkkonen saying in 1998 that ‘ the
1 Donohue and Levitt 2000. 2 Crime Rate In The United States, 1980 – 2014 (2020). 3 Levitt and Dubner 2007. 4 See Traub 2020. 5 Crime Rate in The United States, 1980 – 2014. 6 Annual Uniform Crime Reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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