Roe
v. Wade Resulted in Unborn
Criminals, Economists Theorize
By ERICA GOODE
No
one is certain why crime rates have plummeted in the United
States over the last decade. But that fact has not prevented
politicians
from gleefully taking credit for the downturn, or academics
from ruminating
endlessly on its causes.
The newest theory
about why crime is down, however, put forward in a
report by two
highly regarded economists, is drawing both outrage and
intense debate
-- even before the full report has been published or
subjected to
peer review.
In the report,
Dr. John J. Donohue 3d of Stanford Law School and Dr.
Steven D. Levitt
of the University of Chicago contend that a large share
of the drop
in crime in the 1990's -- perhaps as much as half -- can be
attributed to
the sharp increase in abortions after the Supreme Court
ruling in Roe
v. Wade in 1973.
Fewer crimes
are being committed now, the researchers say, because
many of the
children who might have grown up to commit those crimes
were never born.
Within a few years of the Roe v. Wade decision, which
established
a constitutional right to abortion, up to a quarter of
pregnancies
ended in abortion, statistics show.
Dr. Donohue and
Dr. Levitt base their thesis on economic analyses of
crime rates
from 1985 to 1997, examined as a function of abortion rates
two decades
before.
The timing of
the decline in crime, they found, coincided with the period
when children
born shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision would be
reaching the
late teen-age years -- the peak ages for criminal activity.
States that were
the first to legalize abortion, Dr. Donohue and Dr. Levitt
found, including
New York, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, were also
the first to
experience a decrease in crime.
For example,
in states that legalized abortion in 1969 or 1970, the
researchers
found, the cumulative decrease in crime from 1982 to 1997
was greater
than for the rest of the nation. The decrease in murder was
16.2 percent
greater, the decrease in violent crime over all was 34.4
percent greater,
and the decrease in property crime was 35.3 percent
greater.
Also, states
with the highest abortion rates, the researchers found, had
larger reductions
in crime than states with low abortion rates.
The most likely
explanation for these findings, the researchers assert, is
that abortion
has occurred selectively, decreasing the number of children
likely to commit
crimes as adults.
"Most of the
reduction," Dr. Levitt and Dr. Donohue write, "appears to
be attributable
to higher rates of abortion by mothers whose children are
most likely
to be at risk for future crime." Teen-agers, unmarried women
and black women,
for example, have higher rates of abortion, the
researchers
note, and children born to mothers in these groups are
statistically
at higher risk for crime in adulthood.
The economic
benefit to society of abortion in reducing crime, the
researchers
suggest, "may be on the order of $30 billion annually."
The conclusion
of the report, a draft of which was posted on a Web site
of the
Social Science Research Network, is not a popular one. When it
was reported
in The Chicago Tribune on Aug. 8, it provoked angry
op-ed columns,
tirades on radio talk shows and expressions of
indignation
by groups on both sides of the abortion divide.
And the economists
have been accused of everything from promoting
eugenics to
recommending abortion as a means to reduce crime.
"It takes great
skill to simultaneously infuriate the right and the left," said
Dr. Alfred Blumstein,
an expert on crime rates and University Professor
at the Heinz
School of Carnegie Mellon University, observing the ferocity
of the response.
In a news release,
Joseph Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life
Action League,
called the study "so fraught with stupidity that I hardly
know where to
start refuting it."
"Naturally, if
you kill off a million and a half people a year," Mr. Scheidler
said, "a few
criminals will be in that number. So will doctors,
philosophers,
musicians and artists."
Frances Kissling,
president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an
organization
based in Washington, commented that even if the report's
findings were
right, "the question in a certain sense is, 'So what?'
"I don't think
it has any policy implications whatsoever," Ms. Kissling
said. "Abortion
is a profoundly private decision" that women make based
on "their own
lives and circumstances," and not public benefit.
And in a recent
column, Carl Rowan wrote, "I've seen a lot of
far-fetched
and dangerous ideas passed off as 'social research,' but none
more shallow
and potentially malicious than the claim that the drop in
crime in the
United States can be attributed to legalized abortions."
Dr. Blumstein
and other criminal justice experts acknowledged that the
economists may
well have demonstrated that abortion rates have had an
effect on crime,
though until the paper is published and subjected to
academic scrutiny,
they said, it is difficult to assess the findings.
But they expressed
skepticism that abortion's effect on crime was as
great as Dr.
Donohue and Dr. Levitt posited. Declining crime rates, Dr.
Blumstein said,
appear to be the result of many complicated factors,
including the
dwindling of the crack cocaine epidemic, an improved
economy, greater
job opportunities for low-income youth and the steady
growth of the
prison population.
Changing attitudes
among teen-agers and innovative policing strategies
may also be
contributors, other experts said.
"These are very
able guys," Dr. Blumstein said of Dr. Donohue and Dr.
Levitt, "and
I'm prepared to believe that they've discerned an effect. But I
think they've
gone too far in claiming that it can account for half of the
decline, when
there are a multitude of effects going on that are much
more proximate
to the situation."
Dr. David J.
Garrow, a historian at Emory University and author of
"Liberty and
Sexuality" (University of California Press, 1998), a history
of the abortion
debate, called the economists' theory "interesting and
original." But
he questioned the researchers' knowledge of abortion
history and
was skeptical of the usefulness of the report.
"The policy implication
of this paper is that if you renewed Medicaid
funding for
abortion at the Federal level, you'd dramatically reduce crime
17 years from
now," Dr. Garrow said. "But are we going to find any
interest group
in America that is going to make that argument? No.
Neither side
in the debate wants to touch it with a 10-foot pole."
For his part,
Dr. Levitt said in an interview that the research was "by no
means a complete
explanation" and that he and Dr. Donohue were aware
that "the world
is complicated." He added that they did not intend their
work to influence
public policy.
"Our paper should
have little to no impact on any policy regarding
abortion," Dr.
Levitt said.
"There's nothing
in our paper that either indirectly or directly suggests that
we condone denying
anyone the right to have children if they want to
have children,"
Dr. Levitt added. "We've been accused of having a
eugenic agenda
and it just is not an accurate appraisal of what we're
doing at all.
If anything, what our paper says is that when you remove a
government prohibition
against a woman choosing, the woman makes
choices that
lead to better outcomes for her children."
------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT OF ORIGINAL
ARTICLE ---------------
Legalized Abortion and Crime
JOHN J. DONOHUE
Stanford Law School
STEVEN D. LEVITT
University of Chicago; American Bar Foundation
June 1999
Stanford Law School,
Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 1
Abstract:
Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many explanations
for this decline have been
offered, each of them has difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude,
persistence, and
widespread nature of the drop. In this paper we propose a new explanation
for falling crime: the
legalization of abortion roughly twenty years earlier. The empirical
evidence we present is
consistent with abortion playing an important role. First, the timing
of the crime drop corresponds
to the period in which the first cohorts affected by abortion are reaching
the peak ages of criminal
activity. Second, states that legalized abortion before the rest of
the nation were the first to
experience decreasing crime. Third, states with high abortion rates
have seen a greater fall in crime
since 1985. The estimated elasticity of crime with respect to abortion
rates is roughly -.10. The
abortion-related reduction in crime is predominantly attributable to
a decrease in crime per capita
among the young, rather than smaller cohort sizes. Declining crime
rates could result from two
mechanisms: selective abortion on the part of women most at risk to
have children who would
engage in criminal activity, and improved child rearing or environmental
circumstances caused by
better maternal, familial, or fetal circumstances. Extrapolating our
estimates out of sample to a
counterfactual in which there were no abortions, crime rates might
be 10-20 percent higher than
they currently are with abortion. If these estimates are correct, legalized
abortion can explain
about half of the recent fall in crime. All else equal, we predict
that crime rates will continue to fall
slowly for an additional 15-20 years as the full effects of legalized
abortion are gradually felt.
Note: The entire report in Adobe Acrobat format can be downloaded from the source.
A SLATE dialogue on Abortion and Crime with one of the authors provides an interesting discussion and self-criticism of the paper.
Commentary in Newsweek by Robert J Samuelson, Do
We Care About Truth?
But herewe have another paper by an equally sophisticated econometrician arguing exactly the opposite. This is typical in research which applies highly complex statistical modeling techniques to data sets that do not meet the conditions of the method.
Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births
JOHN R. LOTT, JR.
Yale Law School
JOHN E. WHITLEY
University of Adelaide
April 30, 2001
Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254
Abstract:
Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would
have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher
probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that
legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent
families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human
capital and thus crime. The question is: what is the net impact? We find
evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about
0.5 to 7 percent. Previous estimates are shown to suffer from not
directly linking the cohorts who are committing crime with whether they
had been born before or after abortion was legal.