[wordup] Abortion and violent crime

[Adam Shand]

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/faith.php?artnum=19990815

Aborting crime

Is Roe v Wade responsible for the collapse in violent crime?

In the days when I ran an American magazine of ideas, there were certain
topics that were always guaranteed to have copies flying off the
newsstands, readers cancelling subscriptions, and half the staff not
talking to the editor. Anything on race, anything on genetics, anything
on abortion, anything on crime. So I sympathize with all those American
editors who have yet to publish anything on a paper floating around the
think-tanks in America and written by two respected social scientists
from Stanford University Law School and the University of Chicago. The
paper makes one simple, gripping claim. It argues that the precipitous
drop in crime rates in the 1990s might have something to do with the
precipitous increase in abortions in the 1970s. In 1973, when the United
States Supreme Court legalized abortion, vast numbers of poor and
disproportionately black women who had previously had unwanted children
were suddenly able to abort them. Thus a generation of poor kids who,
research tells us, are the most likely group to become criminals, were
snuffed out before they were born. Twenty years later, when they would
have been adolescents and in their peak crime-committing years, they are
not around. Hence, in part, the plummeting crime rate.

Needless to say, no-one wants to believe the paper. Anti-abortion
conservatives are horrified that the phenomenon they abhor - abortion -
could be responsible for a development they applaud - falling crime.
Pro-abortion liberals are equally horrified that they might be
identified with the evil of eugenics, or indeed with anything that might
suggest that criminality can be predicted from birth, or that associates
crime with the poor and black. As the social scientist Charles Murray
put it, "It throws a gigantic mudball into the whole debate. Pro-lifers
are upset, because it offers a rationalisation for abortion and the
pro-choice lobby doesn't want to hear that if you stop poor people
having children, you will help to solve the crime problem." So there has
so far been a remarkable public silence about the paper, despite its
obviously fascinating implications for the debates about abortion,
crime, and race.

For what it's worth, the paper, which I have been able to read, is a
serious and scholarly one. Its authors, John Donahue and Steven Levitt,
are respected academics. The methodology is sound; the arguments tight.
The authors are able to show a clear and close statistical linkage
between otherwise unaccountable drops in crime and increases in abortion
rates some twenty years before. They control for other factors - like an
unprecedentedly good economy, record high imprisonment rates, and a
simple decline in the numbers of adolescents in the mid-1990s. But even
when all these things are taken into account, there is still a steep
drop in crime that is unaccounted for. And the increase in abortion
rates in the 1970s statistically mirrors this decline in almost uncanny
fashion.

It may be hard for the British to appreciate it, but in the 1960s,
abortion was illegal in most American states. It was only at the very
end of that decade that a handful of states - New York and California
foremost among them - legalized abortion. Then in 1973, the U.S. Supreme
Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade struck down all state prohibitions on
abortion. The result was dramatic. The number of abortions in America
went from around 750,000 in 1972 to close to 1.6 million in 1980. The
rate of abortions per 1000 women jumped from around 15 to around 30 in
the same period. The relatively simple premise that Levitt and Donahue
make is that unwanted children are disproportionately likely to be
brought up by absent or resentful parents and are therefore
statistically more likely to commit crime in later life. A whole slew of
uncontroversial studies show this to be the case. What the sudden
availability of abortion did, Levitt and Donahue posit, was to remove
this pool of unhappy, unwanted children from the population, and so
result in a generation of adolescents fifteen to twenty years later who
were better adjusted and less criminally inclined.

Makes sense, doesn't it? The explosive nature of the data, however,
comes in its analysis that the legalization of abortion also
disproportionately affected the poor and racial minorities. Racial
minorities were already twice as likely to have abortions in 1973 as
whites, and after Roe, their abortion rate soared from around 30 per
1000 women to around 60 within five years. It peaked in 1978. Removing
poor black unwanted children would have an especially powerful impact on
crime rates twenty years later, Levitt and Donahue predicted. And so
apparently it has.

The most powerful evidence they provide is related to the fact that New
York and California legalized abortion a few years ahead of the rest of
the United States. So they experienced a sharp increase in abortion
rates four years ahead of the rest of the country. If Donahue and Levitt
are correct, then California and New York should have seen their crime
rates drop sooner and faster than the rest of the country in the 1990s.
And indeed, that is exactly what happened. Rudy Giuliani may want to
claim credit, but New York's early and particularly sharp drop in crime
may have had more to do with the abortion factor than with his brilliant
political stewardship.

There's mercifully no evidence in the paper that the authors in any way
support eugenics; or advocate forced abortions or sterilization for the
poor in order to reduce crime. Quite the contrary. As social scientists,
they are simply pointing out a statistical correlation that may help
explain an otherwise mystifying piece of very good news. Their argument
is also more nuanced than simply saying that future criminals were
aborted. They also argue that the children who were not aborted were
more likely to be wanted, and that therefore may have had a better
upbringing than previous generations. So not only were troubled children
more likely to be absent, happy children were more likely to be present.
The result was a far better environment for rearing, and a far worse
environment for criminality. The hostility to the research in the
American culture war - and the remarkable public silence over it - may
be because the paper hasn't yet been peer-reviewed or published in an
academic journal. We'll see if the silence lasts. It's irrational,
whatever your views on the subject of abortion. If you believe, as I do,
that abortion is morally wrong in almost every circumstance, it matters
not a jot if it leads to a more crime-free society. The ends still don't
justify the means. And if you believe that a woman has an absolute right
to choose what to do with her own body, then she should have that right
regardless of the consequences. And as long as no-one advocates using
abortion as a tool of eugenic social policy, then the implications of
this argument are extremely limited. You might sell a few magazines, and
annoy a few readers. And eventually, heaven forfend, you might even
stumble onto the truth.

August 15, 1999, The Sunday Times of London ("Did abortion make the
crime figures fall?").

copyright © 1999, 2002 Andrew Sullivan