The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
Encyclopedia
"The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" is a controversial paper by John J. Donohue III
of Yale University
and Steven Levitt
of University of Chicago
that argues that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s contributed significantly to reductions in crime rates experienced in the 1990s. The paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics
in 2001, offers evidence that the falling United States crime rates
of the 1990s were mostly caused by the legalization of abortion
due to the Roe v. Wade
court decision of 1973.
and Steven Levitt at Slate.com
. (See this link for Levitt's opening, this link for Sailer's response, this link for Levitt's rebuttal, and this link for a final Sailer response.) Sailer argues that the end of the crack wars was more significant than abortion -- and that, contrary to what Levitt's thesis would suggest, "the murder rate for 1993's crop of 14- to 17-year-olds (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975 to 1979) was a horrifying 3.6 times that of the kids who were 14 to 17 years old in 1984 (who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966 to 1970)."
and John Whitley argued that Donohue and Levitt assume that states which completely legalized abortion had higher abortion rates than states where abortion was only legal under certain conditions (many states allowed abortion only under certain conditions prior to Roe) and that CDC statistics do not substantiate this claim. In addition, if abortion rates cause crime rates to fall, crime rates should start to fall among the youngest people first and then gradually be seen lowering the crime rate for older and older people. In fact, they argue, the murder rates first start to fall among the oldest criminals and then the next oldest criminals and so on until it last falls among the youngest individuals. Lott and Whitley argue that if Donohue and Levitt are right that 50 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s is due solely to the legalization of abortion, their results should be seen in these graphs without anything being controlled for, and that in fact the opposite is true.
On May 15, 2005, Levitt replied to Sailer and Lott in his Freakonomics
blog at the New York Times, and argued that two of the key assumptions underlying their alternative hypothesis are false.
Donohue and Levitt respond to each point that Joyce makes in a reply paper and conclude that none of Joyce's arguments cast doubt on the original hypothesis presented in their 2001 paper. They also introduce an updated version of their dataset which had better measures of abortion (given to them by Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute after their initial paper was published).
economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz released a working paper, "Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001).", in which they argued that Donohue and Levitt's study did not estimate the regressions that Donohue and Levitt had claimed that they examined. In particular, Foote and Goetz said that, despite their claims that they had done so, the 2001 Donohue and Levitt study failed to control for influences that varied within a state from year to year (such as the effect of crack-cocaine). Foote and Goetz also point out that Donohue and Levitt accidentally used the total number of arrests, not the arrest rate, to explain the murder rate. Using the total number of arrests does not establish the unwantedness mechanism Donohue and Levitt propose, only that the total number of arrests has changed. After making these two corrections, Foot and Goetz interpreted their results as evidence that violent crime actually increases with more abortions and that property crime is unrelated to abortions. This study received press coverage in The Wall Street Journal
and The Economist
.
Donohue and Levitt admit the programming error made in the original version of the paper and then go on to address the two points that Foote and Goetz make (see here for the reply). Donohue and Levitt contend that even though the Foote and Goetz analysis was doing what Donohue and Levitt claim that they were originally doing, the Foote and Goetz analysis produces heavy attenuation bias (the reason they find no statistical relationship between abortion and crime). To remedy this, Donohue and Levitt use the improved abortion measures (that Lott and Whitley originally used) and they make other changes that they now argue are necessary. Donohue and Levitt claim that with these new changes the results are smaller, but still statistically significant.
, published in the Claremont Review of Books in Spring of 2006. He said that the Donohue and Levitt model had its "standard errors explode due to multicollinearity
" when both contemporary and historic abortion rates were included in the statistical analysis. Donohue and Levitt opted to exclude contemporary abortion rates from their analysis. Mueller, on the other hand, posits that economic fatherhood is a prime determinant of violent crime; the reasoning being that supporting a child makes a man much less likely to commit a violent crime. Economic fatherhood, as defined by Mueller, demonstrates a strong correlation with both crime and with abortion. Such an analysis not only makes sense of abortion rates in the 1980s and 1990s, Mueller says, but also explains the rise in violent crime beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s.
suggests an alternative explanation for the correlation observed by Donohue and Levitt. His study, which included several other countries in addition to the United States, suggests that variations in estimated early-childhood blood lead level
s (from exposure to leaded gasoline and paint) can better explain the variation in violent crime rates over the years. For example, it better explains why crime rates rose in the first place, and continued to rise in the UK (who continued to use leaded gasoline after the USA phased it out) even though abortion was legalized. It also explains why New York (especially NYC) and California (which legalized abortion before Roe) saw crime rates drop earlier than the rest of the nation, since they were also more proactive in reducing lead exposure. The theory is biologically plausible, given that lead is a known neurotoxin which has long been linked to impulsivity, delinquency, violence, and reduced IQ.
In Levitt's reply in his Freakonomics blog at the New York Times, he notes that while a 2007 study by Jessica Reyes also found that lead had a large effect on violent crime, the same study found that the effect of legalized abortion remained similar in magnitude to that in Levitt's study, and statistically and practically significant (albeit as one of the lesser factors), even after controlling for blood lead levels and several other confounders.
John J. Donohue III
John Donohue is a law professor and economist widely known for his writings on effect of legalized abortion on crime and criticism of the More Guns, Less Crime theory of John Lott.-Biography:John J. Donohue III was born on January 30, 1953...
of Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
and Steven Levitt
Steven Levitt
Steven David "Steve" Levitt is an American economist known for his work in the field of crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2004 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the William B...
of University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
that argues that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s contributed significantly to reductions in crime rates experienced in the 1990s. The paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics
Quarterly Journal of Economics
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, or QJE, is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Oxford University Press and edited at Harvard University's Department of Economics. Its current editors are Robert J. Barro, Elhanan Helpman and Lawrence F. Katz...
in 2001, offers evidence that the falling United States crime rates
Crime in the United States
Crime statistics for the United States are published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Uniform Crime Reports which represents crimes reported to the police...
of the 1990s were mostly caused by the legalization of abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
due to the Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, , was a controversial landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion,...
court decision of 1973.
Abstract
"We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime."History of argument
The 1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future is one of the better known early versions of this claim, but it was surely not the first. The Commission cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion "turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance." A study by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe was cited by the Rockefeller Commission and is probably the first serious empirical research on this topic. They studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these "unwanted" children to another group – the next children born after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The "unwanted" children were more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes and were more likely to become delinquents and engaged in crime. Levitt and Donohue revived discussion of this issue with their paper, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime."Sailer
In 1999, before the paper was published, a debate was held between magazine writer and Internet columnist Steve SailerSteve Sailer
Steven Ernest Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a blogger, a VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports.-Personal life:Sailer grew up...
and Steven Levitt at Slate.com
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
. (See this link for Levitt's opening, this link for Sailer's response, this link for Levitt's rebuttal, and this link for a final Sailer response.) Sailer argues that the end of the crack wars was more significant than abortion -- and that, contrary to what Levitt's thesis would suggest, "the murder rate for 1993's crop of 14- to 17-year-olds (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975 to 1979) was a horrifying 3.6 times that of the kids who were 14 to 17 years old in 1984 (who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966 to 1970)."
Lott and Whitley
In 2001, John LottJohn Lott
John Richard Lott Jr. is an American academic and political commentator. He has previously held research positions at academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, College Park,...
and John Whitley argued that Donohue and Levitt assume that states which completely legalized abortion had higher abortion rates than states where abortion was only legal under certain conditions (many states allowed abortion only under certain conditions prior to Roe) and that CDC statistics do not substantiate this claim. In addition, if abortion rates cause crime rates to fall, crime rates should start to fall among the youngest people first and then gradually be seen lowering the crime rate for older and older people. In fact, they argue, the murder rates first start to fall among the oldest criminals and then the next oldest criminals and so on until it last falls among the youngest individuals. Lott and Whitley argue that if Donohue and Levitt are right that 50 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s is due solely to the legalization of abortion, their results should be seen in these graphs without anything being controlled for, and that in fact the opposite is true.
On May 15, 2005, Levitt replied to Sailer and Lott in his Freakonomics
Freakonomics
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been described as...
blog at the New York Times, and argued that two of the key assumptions underlying their alternative hypothesis are false.
Joyce
Ted Joyce made a number of arguments against the abortion and crime hypothesis in his 2004 paper "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?". He claimed that legal abortions in the early 1970s were just replacing illegal abortions, that there was no measurable impact of abortion between 1985 and 1990, that cohorts born before 1973 had roughly the same crime rates as cohorts born after 1973 in the states where abortion was legalized in 1973, and that omitted variables are driving the results.Donohue and Levitt respond to each point that Joyce makes in a reply paper and conclude that none of Joyce's arguments cast doubt on the original hypothesis presented in their 2001 paper. They also introduce an updated version of their dataset which had better measures of abortion (given to them by Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute after their initial paper was published).
Foote and Goetz
In November 2005, Federal Reserve Bank of BostonFederal Reserve Bank of Boston
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, commonly known as the Boston Fed, is responsible for the First District of the Federal Reserve, which covers most of Connecticut , Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. It is headquartered in the Federal Reserve Bank Building in Boston,...
economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz released a working paper, "Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001).", in which they argued that Donohue and Levitt's study did not estimate the regressions that Donohue and Levitt had claimed that they examined. In particular, Foote and Goetz said that, despite their claims that they had done so, the 2001 Donohue and Levitt study failed to control for influences that varied within a state from year to year (such as the effect of crack-cocaine). Foote and Goetz also point out that Donohue and Levitt accidentally used the total number of arrests, not the arrest rate, to explain the murder rate. Using the total number of arrests does not establish the unwantedness mechanism Donohue and Levitt propose, only that the total number of arrests has changed. After making these two corrections, Foot and Goetz interpreted their results as evidence that violent crime actually increases with more abortions and that property crime is unrelated to abortions. This study received press coverage in The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
and The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
.
Donohue and Levitt admit the programming error made in the original version of the paper and then go on to address the two points that Foote and Goetz make (see here for the reply). Donohue and Levitt contend that even though the Foote and Goetz analysis was doing what Donohue and Levitt claim that they were originally doing, the Foote and Goetz analysis produces heavy attenuation bias (the reason they find no statistical relationship between abortion and crime). To remedy this, Donohue and Levitt use the improved abortion measures (that Lott and Whitley originally used) and they make other changes that they now argue are necessary. Donohue and Levitt claim that with these new changes the results are smaller, but still statistically significant.
Mueller
John D. Mueller introduced a new argument into the debate in his review of FreakonomicsFreakonomics
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been described as...
, published in the Claremont Review of Books in Spring of 2006. He said that the Donohue and Levitt model had its "standard errors explode due to multicollinearity
Multicollinearity
Multicollinearity is a statistical phenomenon in which two or more predictor variables in a multiple regression model are highly correlated. In this situation the coefficient estimates may change erratically in response to small changes in the model or the data...
" when both contemporary and historic abortion rates were included in the statistical analysis. Donohue and Levitt opted to exclude contemporary abortion rates from their analysis. Mueller, on the other hand, posits that economic fatherhood is a prime determinant of violent crime; the reasoning being that supporting a child makes a man much less likely to commit a violent crime. Economic fatherhood, as defined by Mueller, demonstrates a strong correlation with both crime and with abortion. Such an analysis not only makes sense of abortion rates in the 1980s and 1990s, Mueller says, but also explains the rise in violent crime beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s.
Nevin
Rick NevinRick Nevin
Rick Nevin is an economic consultant who acts as an adviser to the National Center for Healthy Housing and has worked on the Federal Strategy to eliminate childhood lead poisoning...
suggests an alternative explanation for the correlation observed by Donohue and Levitt. His study, which included several other countries in addition to the United States, suggests that variations in estimated early-childhood blood lead level
Blood lead level
Blood lead level , is a measure of lead in the body. It is measured in micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood ; 10 µg/dL is equivalent to 0.48 micromoles per liter ....
s (from exposure to leaded gasoline and paint) can better explain the variation in violent crime rates over the years. For example, it better explains why crime rates rose in the first place, and continued to rise in the UK (who continued to use leaded gasoline after the USA phased it out) even though abortion was legalized. It also explains why New York (especially NYC) and California (which legalized abortion before Roe) saw crime rates drop earlier than the rest of the nation, since they were also more proactive in reducing lead exposure. The theory is biologically plausible, given that lead is a known neurotoxin which has long been linked to impulsivity, delinquency, violence, and reduced IQ.
In Levitt's reply in his Freakonomics blog at the New York Times, he notes that while a 2007 study by Jessica Reyes also found that lead had a large effect on violent crime, the same study found that the effect of legalized abortion remained similar in magnitude to that in Levitt's study, and statistically and practically significant (albeit as one of the lesser factors), even after controlling for blood lead levels and several other confounders.
See also
- Legalized abortion and crime effectLegalized abortion and crime effectThe effect of legalized abortion on crime is the theory that legal abortion reduces crime. Proponents of the theory generally argue that since unwanted children are more likely to become criminals and that an inverse correlation is observed between the availability of abortion and subsequent crime...
- Roe effectRoe effectThe Roe effect is a theory about the long-term effect of abortion on the political balance of the United States, which suggests that since supporters of abortion rights cause the erosion of their own political base, the practice of abortion will eventually lead to the restriction or illegalization...
- William BennettWilliam BennettWilliam John "Bill" Bennett is an American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist. He served as United States Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. He also held the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W...
- FreakonomicsFreakonomicsFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been described as...