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May 22, 2012 |
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The legalized abortion and crime effect is the theory that the legalization of abortion in the United States, due to Roe v. Wade, has reduced the number of unwanted children – children who are more likely to become criminals – and thus has reduced crime in recent years. In short, fewer unwanted children leads to fewer crimes. It is unclear whether such an effect has ever been empirically demonstrated. Although individuals have suggested this correlation in the past, perhaps the two academics that are most notably associated with this theory are Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University with their 2001 paper The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime. Levitt and Donohue use statistics to point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicate that crime started to decline in 1992. Levitt and Donohue suggest that the absence of unwanted aborted children, following legalisation in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children. Levitt argues that states that had abortion legalized earlier and more wide spread should have the largest reductions in crime. Levitt and Donohue's study indicates that this indeed has happened: California, New York, Alaska, Washington and Hawaii had steeper drops in crime and had had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Levitt, however, assumed 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). John Lott has argued that this assumption is untrue based on CDC statistics. Levitt responded some of the controversy of his paper on NPR's Weekend Edition while promoting his book, Freakonomics, although not the crticisms of his methodology. He stated:
Criticisms Since Levitt used correlational statistics, cause and effect cannot be determined on the basis of his data, only suggested. Thus it is possible that another factor, other than abortion, caused crime to drop. In 1999, even before the paper was published, magazine writer and Internet columnist Steve Sailer debated Levitt at Slate (magazine)|Slate.com on this point. (See http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/ this link for Levitt's opening, http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33575/ this link for Sailer's response and Levitt's rebuttal, and http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33726/ this link for a final Sailer response.) Sailer noted, among other things, that the generation of children born immediately after Roe, which by Levitt's thesis should have been more law-abiding than those born before Roe, instead went on the worst youth murder spree in American history. The murder rate for 14-17 year olds in 1993, who were born during the high-abortion years of 1975 to 1979, was 3.6 times higher than 14-17 year olds in 1984, who were born prior to Roe v. Wade. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/teens.htm From 1999 to 2002, crime jumped 17 percent among 25 to 34 year olds, the first crop of children born after legalized abortion. Sailer argues, like Foote and Goetz, that the shifts in the crime rate had to do with the crack epidemic that ravaged America's inner-cities during the 1980s, much more than any effect of abortion. Foote and Goetz In November 2005, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz published a 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 had multiple flaws. In particular, they argue that the 2001 study failed to control for influences that varied from state to state and from year to year and offered the Cocaine|crack epidemic, whose influence differed depending on time and place, as an example. They also claimed to find a "serious computer error" in the program used by Donohue and Levitt and that they had used methods with unacceptably small sample sizes, e.g. using arrest totals rather than arrest rates across a population. Foote and Goetz said that the measured impact of legalized abortion on crime rates vanishes in their study. This result was reported in the Wall Street Journal and the The Economist. The Economist reported both Donohue and his critic Ted Joyce basically agreeing that as more controls are added, as Foote and Goetz do over 50 states and 12 years, the less ability the data has to tell you what is most influencing it. Levitt, in his Freakonomics blog further attacked the Foote and Goetz paper as controlling so many variables that it essentially reduced the "signal noise" of the abortion-crime correlation measured in the original paper to nothing. Donohue states that, "The debate over abortion and crime will not be resolved with the parameters of our paper."ref|notresolved # note|notresolved http://www.economist.com/finance/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5246700 Oops-onomics, The Economist, 1 December 2005
Category:Abortion Category:Crime This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Legalized abortion and crime effect".
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