Legalized abortion responsible for decline in crime rate?
Date: Jun 17, 2005 8:27 AM
EXCERPT: But now, another economist, John R. Lott, says his
number-crunching shows that Mr. Levitt and Dr. Morgentaler are wrong.
Mr. Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime, specializes in crime
economics. (Coincidentally, Mr. Levitt raises questions about Mr. Lott’s
own research on the relationship between crime and firearms ownership in
Freakonomics, mentioning “the troubling allegation that Lott actually
invented some of the survey data.”)

PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2005.06.17
EDITION: EARLY
SECTION: News
PAGE: A1 / Front
BYLINE: Joanne Laucius
SOURCE: The Ottawa Citizen
NOTE: More Abortion Controversy: Morgentaler gets degree, page A3

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Legalized abortion responsible for decline in crime rate, provocative
new book says: Fewer children living in poor, single-parent homes,
economist says

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A quirky new book about the economics of drug dealing and baby naming
has stirred up a tiff about another theory it raises — the possibility
that abortion may be responsible for the declining crime rate.

Oddly enough, the arena of the debate is not religion or ethics, but
economics.

The relationship between abortion and the falling crime rate came up in
Freakonomics, a provocative bestseller co-authored by University of
Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt.

In the book, Mr. Levitt, who recently won the John Bates Clark Medal for
the best American economist under 40, argues that legalized abortion is
responsible for a large part of the decline in crime in the 1990s.

Crime rates began to fall in the early ’90s, just as the first cohort of
children born after legalized abortion hit their late teens. “What this
cohort was missing, or course, were the children who stood a greater
chance of becoming criminals,” he said in Freakonomics.

In fact, Canada’s premier campaigner for abortion rights, Dr. Henry
Morgentaler, has said that he predicted the same decline in crime and
mental illness some 30 years ago.

“It took a long time for this prediction to come true,” says Dr.
Morgentaler in a statement on his website. “I expect that things will
get better as more and more children are born into families that want
and desire them, and receive them with joy and anticipation.”

But now, another economist, John R. Lott, says his number-crunching
shows that Mr. Levitt and Dr. Morgentaler are wrong.

Mr. Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime, specializes in crime
economics. (Coincidentally, Mr. Levitt raises questions about Mr. Lott’s
own research on the relationship between crime and firearms ownership in
Freakonomics, mentioning “the troubling allegation that Lott actually
invented some of the survey data.”)

Mr. Lott says the ethics debate around abortion doesn’t interest him
much, but Mr. Levitt’s assertions did. However, he says, when he tried
using other sets of data, he found he didn’t come to the same
conclusion.

“I just got curiouser and curiouser,” said Mr. Lott. “If you can
find
something that explains a drop in the murder rates, that’s extremely
important.”

In Freakonomics, Mr. Levitt examines the perplexing question of why
crime dropped in the 1990s, a trend entirely the reverse of what was
expected by criminologists and demographers. He concedes that more
police and the bursting of the crack cocaine bubble accounted for a
small amount of the drop.

But the legalization of abortion across the U.S. in 1973 accounts for
much of the rest, Mr. Levitt maintains.

By 1980, the number of abortions in the U.S. had reached 1.6 million a
year. Studies show that “the typical child that went unborn in the
earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50-per-cent more
likely to live in poverty; he would also have been 60-per-cent more
likely to grow up with just one parent.” Both factors are common
predictors of a life of crime, said Mr. Levitt.

Mr. Levitt bolsters his theory with other arguments. He points out that
children born after an abortion ban in Romania in 1966 were more likely
to become criminals than those born before. And women denied an abortion
were more likely to resent their children, he suggested.

He added that crime rates in the U.S. started to drop sooner in the five
states that legalized abortion before 1973. And states with the highest
abortion rates in the 1970s also had the greatest drop in crime rates in
the 1990s.

Australian economist Andrew Leigh asked the same question in 1999 about
his own country after he read a paper co-written by Mr. Levitt.

He found that some states that legalized abortion earlier were also the
first to experience a drop in crime. Victoria, for example, which
legalized abortion in 1969, saw homicide decline from 1987-88. New South
Wales, which legalized it in 1971, saw homicides decline from 1989-90,
he reported.

While evidence from other regions of Australia didn’t support the
theory, Mr. Leigh concluded that “there is enough evidence that we
should be suspicious next time we hear a politician or police chief
taking responsibility for the latest drop in crime.”

Mr. Lott has difficulties with both Mr. Levitt’s data and his
conclusion.

If Mr. Levitt’s theory was correct, crime rates should have started
falling among younger people who were first born after the legalization
of abortion, he said.

He says his data shows that the opposite is true: murder rates during
the 1990s first started falling for the oldest criminals and last for
the youngest.

Mr. Lott said some of Mr. Levitt’s data came from an organization
affiliated with Planned Parenthood and assumes that states went from a
complete ban on abortion to complete legalization. However, abortions
had been permitted in some cases before complete legalization.

Mr. Lott’s data, from the Centers for Disease Control, shows that before
the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973, many of the states that allowed
abortions in limited circumstances actually had higher rates of abortion
than states where abortion was legal.

The answer isn’t “anywhere near as cut and dry” as Mr. Levitt suggests,
said Mr. Lott.

Most of all, he’s disturbed that the abortion theory can be used as a
eugenics argument — that aborting the fetuses of people in a particular
racial or ethnic group would benefit society through less crime.

Mr. Levitt admits that the relationship between crime and abortion seems
“Swiftian” — a reference to 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift who
suggested that a solution to famine in Ireland was to eat Irish babies.

“To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering
factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring,” he noted in
Freakonomics.

Mr. Lott says he doesn’t expect his unpublished 44-page paper, which has
been submitted to the Journal of Legal Studies, to make the same splash
as Freakonomics.

“I do the research. If someone finds it interesting, that’s good.”