Is The Legalization of Abortion Responsible for Lowering Crime Rates?
by Ellen Smith
An unpublished -- but widely circulated -- analysis by two university researchers suggests that legalization of abortion in the early 1970s is largely responsible for the reduced crime rate the U.S. has experienced in the 1990s. The premise is that access to legal abortion resulted in fewer unwanted children being born to grow up to commit crimes in their teens and 20s - the peak age range for criminal activity.
Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago and the American Bar Foundation, and John Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor, report finding a strong relationship between a state's abortion rate in the 1970s and the drop in the crime rate observed in that state in the 1990s. According to the Chicago Tribune (8/8/99), they concluded that access to legal abortion in the 1970s may explain as much as half of the overall crime reduction that the U.S. experienced between 1991 and 1997.
It is particularly interesting to note that these researchers did not set out to study the societal impact of abortion, but were investigating possible reasons for the drop in the crime rate. Both have published previously on how various factors, such as police practices and prison sentencing, affect crime rates. The rapid fall in the crime rate in the 1990s has baffled researchers, in part because of its suddenness, which suggests an abrupt change in one of the conditions that affect crime rates. Because the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision did cause an abrupt increase in the number of legal abortions, this new hypothesis could help account for the suddenness of the drop in crime.
This research finding appears to support the pro-choice belief that society would benefit if every child were a wanted child. However, this summer when the study received attention in the news media, pro-choice spokespeople declined to comment or made only lukewarm statements about the study. Media commentators said it would be ill-advised for the pro-choice movement to promote the study as evidence of the social benefits of legal abortion.
Why be reticent to promote these findings? There seem to be several reasons:
1. This is unpublished research. At the time the story hit the news media, the paper had not even been submitted for publication in a research journal. Scientists are normally skeptical of findings until they have been subject to peer review and have been confirmed by follow-up study. The methodology used in analyzing the data in this study appears to require particularly careful scrutiny, as the analysis involved extensive manipulation of statistics on abortion rates and crime incidence.
2. The statistics analyzed in this study cannot demonstrate cause and effect, and the researchers acknowledge that their findings are speculative. The statistical relationship between the legalization of abortion and the drop in the crime rate might prove to be a coincidence. Further study would be needed to establish cause and effect, for example, to see if the legalization of abortion is correlated with other social factors related to criminality.
3. The message from this study could easily be misinterpreted in some disturbing ways. For example, it could be misrepresented as saying that the groups with the highest rates of abortion (young, unmarried, and low-income women) need to be prevented from having children -- and encouraged to abort their pregnancies -- to prevent the birth of future criminals. Scripps-Howard columnist Bonnie Erbe speculated about "how pregnant poor women and teens are going to react to the argument that their unwanted children are likely to grow up to become criminals - [this] might make a few women carry pregnancies to term just for spite." These would be unfortunate perversions. As a spokesman for the Alan Guttmacher Institute pointed out to the Chicago Tribune, "This is not an argument for abortion per se. This is an argument for women not being forced to have children they don't want to have."
It does appear that we need to "wait and see" what happens next with this provocative study and hypothesis. Advocate readers with Internet access who want to read the manuscript "Legalized Abortion and Crime" for themselves can download it from the Stanford Law School web site at http://www.law.stanford.edu/ or http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=174508
Last Modified January 2, 2000.