How Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime
And the side of the story economists never examined — the parents
If you ever want to stop the conversation cold during a heartwarming Catholic holiday dinner with extremely conservative parents, just mention the Donohue–Levitt hypothesis.
The theory originated with those adorable Freakonomics guys — Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. (Yeah, I kind of have a crush on Levitt. Don’t judge.) Most people have heard of the Donahue-Levitt hypothesis, but here’s a refresher.
Although most Americans think we live in a violent period today, crime rates tell a different story. Between 1960 and 1970, the violent crime rate increased by 126 percent. Between 1970 and 1980, violent crime increased by 64 percent. Many who lived through New York City in the 1980s remember. The city looked like a bad purge movie on most days.
Today, the crime rate is at a historic low and has dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1990. To put this in perspective of victims and not perpetrators, the National Crime Victimization Survey found that after 1993, criminal victimizations fell from 79.8 victimizations to 23.2 victimizations per 1,000 people.
That’s a lot of unruined lives.
So Levitt began looking for correlative data on why crime plummeted. And after eliminating stricter gun laws, a strengthening economy, more innovative police strategies, an aging population, and an increase in capital punishment, he found only one reason that explained a safer world — the 1973 Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortion.
Basically, legalizing abortion in the 1970s decreased crime rates from 1990 onward. The reason — unwanted children after Roe v. Wade were never born.
As I explained to my parents after the eggnog was poured…
Imagine that poignant scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when George Bailey realizes his family and friends would have been worse off if he had never been born. Except this holiday classic is called, It’s a Never Became a Shitty Life. In this film, George Bailey is born to a mother who didn’t have the maturity or resources to care for him. So George grows up to be a real douchebag who causes mayhem and murder in the lives he touches. But a famous court case prevents George from being born, so his victims have a better life.
The end.
Again, this did not make me popular at Christmas dinner.
I am not the only one. Since the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics, which featured this hypothesis, Donahue and Levitt have taken their share of heat. Critics point to other factors that contributed to lower crime rates. Their loudest argument is the crack cocaine epidemic that caused crime rates to surge in the late 1980s, disproportionally affecting Black men.
The government cracked down on drug users by incarcerating them (again, mainly imprisoning Black men), and that caused a drop in crime rates.
As Levitt points out in his rebuttal, the arrival of crack did lead to increased crime. But the decline in crack did not lead to a statistically relevant drop in violent crime. Levitt explains;
“…for every 10 percent that murder rose between 1985 and 1991, it fell by only 2.6 percent between 1991 and 1997. For your story to explain the decline in crime that we attribute to legalized abortion, this estimate would have to be about five times bigger.”
But their critics were still biting at their controversial heels. So being good economists, in 2019, Donahue and Levitt reexamined the data.
This time they included crime data spanning 1997 to 2014. (The original data only included crime rates from 1985 to 1997.) Their newer research found an even stronger correlation between higher abortion rates and lower crime rates. With more data, Roe v. Wade accounted for “45% of the decline in crime rates over the past three decades.”
Of course, their theory still has its detractors, and their arguments are valid. Whenever you have any correlation study, it’s nearly impossible to isolate one causation. The problem is not that “correlation does not imply causation.” The problem is that too many correlations affect one causation.
Either way, I am surprised some equally sexy economists have not examined another correlation between abortion and crime.
Did the parents who chose not to have unwanted children lead better lives than those who didn’t have that choice?
I know. I know…This is going to get me disinvited from Christmas dinner yet again. (In this dream sequence, I reenact Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner, except Levitt is my boyfriend. Just play along…)
It would not be hard to isolate Labor Bureau Statistics, health records, and criminal records from mothers who had abortions after 1973 vs. mothers who didn’t have a choice.
Sure, you would face the same problems as the original hypothesis. Obviously, other factors led to a higher quality of living for women after 1973 — a smaller wage gap, more educational opportunities, better access to healthcare, more financial autonomy, etc. (Remember, women could not get a credit card until 1974.)
But perhaps we should be examining those contributors anyway.
As the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in the coming month, we will have plenty of debates on how illegal abortions will set the women’s movement backward. Or, I should say, how it will set the women’s movement backward for poorer people who won’t have access to safe abortions.
Rich white women will get access to safe abortions. Black women know this. It’s why 94 percent of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton vs. only 54 percent of white women. (Yeah, sorry. I still have not forgiven my white idiot friends for voting for that unformed homunculus. It’s why I am no longer friends with them.)
Unfortunately, if women (and men) are forced to have children they are not prepared to have, they will have less opportunity to go to college, establish financial independence, or focus on their career goals. Conservatives know the cost of The Motherhood Penalty.
When women do not have agency over their bodies, they do not have agency over their lives.
In the coming months, we will have more of these debates. But if you want to really piss off your conservative relatives, just mention the Donohue–Levitt hypothesis after the eggnog hits.
