Legalized abortion and crime rates
significantly increased a child’s criminal prospects. 14 Thus, we can conclude that women who are disproportionately likely to seek abortions are also more likely to fit the rough criteria of women who, on average, are more likely to raise potentially criminal children. Upon revisiting the study in 2019, the two original authors concluded that ‘ crime fell roughly 20% between 1997 and 2014 due to legalized abortion ’ , and that the ‘ cumulative impact of legalized abortion was approximately 45% ’ , suggesting that it was the primary reason for the fall in crime during the 1990s in America. 15 Moreover, in 2014, Abel Francois and others, conducting a study for the International Reviewof Lawand Economics, found evidence that abortion caused a significant decrease in crime rates after he surveyed 16 western European countries post-1990. 16 Demographic statistics from Canada also suggest that liberalized abortion reduced levels of violent crime. However, a lack of reliable figures from other international countries has made it almost impossible to gather any further evidence of the hypothesis. On the one hand, the arguments above present a strong case for an inverse correlation between crime and abortion, and Donohue and Levitt tried to justify this by using a lot of mathematical statistical modelling and a technique called regression analysis – a control tool used to artificially hold a number of different variables constant so you can easily look at the relationship between just two of the variables. For example, one could argue that the strong US economy at the time reduced unemployment, which therefore decreased crime as people were working to earn money rather than resorting to illegal activities. However, the hypothesis disproves this in two ways: firstly, high levels of crime existed in the 1960s despite the strong economy then, and secondly, the fact that homicides fell fastest in the 1990s disproves this idea as there is no link between murder rates and the economy. The theory also disproved ideas of innovative policing strategies reducing crime, and ideas that the decline in the demand for crack cocaine at the time led to a more civilized society with less drug-related conflicts. On the other hand, there has been a lot of criticism directed at the hypothesis. To begin with, one major flaw in the hypothesis is the prevalence of illegal abortions that existed long before Roe vs. Wade. Although they were certainly riskier and more expensive, a 1958 report estimated that abortions in the US at the time were between 200,000 and 1.2million annually, so the sudden availability of legal abortion would not have had somuch of an impact on society. 17 The study also fails to take into account any internal migration - women planning on having abortions could have simply travelled to states, such as Hawaii, that had legalize d abortion before Roe vs. Wade. In Joyce and Zhang’s Abortion before and after Roe study, they say that in absolute numbers, 29,227 women travelled to and from Michigan to New York for an abortion in 1971, two years before Roe vs. Wade. 18 Most compelling though, are the statistics on age-specific crimes, which contend that the frequency of crimes committed by the youngest offenders did not actually change. Children born after legalized abortion committed crimes at the same rate as those before legalized abortion. Other critics have rejected the results, such as Samuel Kahn, who claimed that proof of a link between being an unwanted child and having a higher
14 Wright &Wright 1994. 15 Donohue and Levitt 2019. 16 François, et al. 2014.
17 Calderone 1958. 18 Joyce et al. 2012.
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