Legalized abortion and crime rates
closer we look at the drop in crime, the more complex it gets ’ . 7 Yet in 2000, Donohue Levitt and propounded their provocative and divisive theory, stating that the legalization of abortion had meant a reduction in the number of criminals. (It is worth noting that Donohue and Levitt emphasized in their study that the likelihood of a child becoming a criminal was based solely on environmental factors, and completely rejected genetic or cultural explanations. As Richard Banks wrote, the study, like this essay, ‘ does not purport to explain, much less justify, racial inequality ’ , and it ‘doesn’t rely, implicitly or explicitly, on any intimation that black or Latino people are somehow naturally inclined toward criminality ’ .) 8 Twenty-seven years earlier, in 1973, a landmark Supreme Court ruling, known as Roe v. Wade, affirmed the legality of a woman’s right to have an abortion throughout the entire country. This means that the start of the American crime-drop in 1993 perfectly coincided with the twenty-year anniversary of Roe vs. Wade – the aborted cohort that should have just been realizing their criminal potential at ages 18- 20 weren’t around. The hypothesis argued that women who want an abortion but can’t get one tend to not want their children very much; children who are not wanted are more likely to turn to criminal activities. Mothers who never wanted a child in the first place are more likely to neglect their offspring, often because they do not have the experience, time or financial means to properly raise their child alone (unlike families with two parents). Obviously, the hypothesis also found that with every abortion, there is one less baby born and thus one less potential criminal. However, more interestingly, it found the states that experienced the crime drop first were the states that had legalized abortion earliest: Hawaii, New York, Oregon, California and Alaska. As well as this, Levitt subsequently found that states with the highest abortion rates post Roe vs. Wade experienced a 30% greater drop in crime than the states with the lowest abortion rates. 9 Of course, not every potential child that was aborted would have grown up to be a criminal. Yet, after Roe vs. Wade, the number of abortions suddenly skyrocketed, as specialized and safety-focused clinics opened across the country. Before Roe vs. Wade, abortions were risky, illegal, and exclusive, often only available to the wealthy, but after 1973, abortions became much cheaper, and the women who took advantage of this sudden development were mainly young, single and poor mothers from low socio- economic backgrounds. 10 In fact, even today in the UK, 81% of abortions are carried out on single mothers, a proportion that has remained constant for the last two decades. 11 Meanwhile, it was estimated that around three quarters of all abortion patients in the US in the 2010s were classified as poor or low income. 12 These proportions were probably more or less the same in post-1973 America; therefore, it’s likely that the majority of women who sought abortions then were poor, uneducated, young and single. As Freakonomics explains, some of the most proven and conclusive indicators that a child will grow up to have a criminal future are these four factors: single-parent households, low income households, young or teenage parents and low levels of parental education. 13 Wright’s research on Family Life and Delinquency and Crime culminated by suggesting that the absence of a father at home was the single most important cause of crime, while Dubner wrote that having an adolescent parent
7 Butterfield 1999. 8 Banks 2001.
9 Donohue and Levitt 2019. 10 Levitt and Dubner 2007. 11 Office for National Statistics, 12 Abortion Worldwide 2017: Uneven Progress and Unequal Access (2020). 13 Levitt and Dubner 2007.
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