The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime

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The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (German about the impact of legalized abortion on crime rates ) is a controversial study by John Donohue of Yale University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago from 2001. She claims the legalization abortion in the US in the 1970s would have resulted ina significant decrease in crime in the United States in the 1990s.

The publication from the Quarterly Journal of Economics states that the falling crime rate of the 1990s was mainly due to the legalization of abortion by the Roe v. Wade decision was brought about in 1973.

Critical reception

Sailer

In 1999, even before the article was published, a debate arose between journalist Steve Sailer on the one hand and Steven Levitt on the other on Slate.com . Sailer argues that the decline in crack prevalence in the United States was more significant than abortion and, contrary to what Levitt's thesis would suggest, the 1993 homicide rate for 14- to 17-year-olds (those in the Weddings of abortion born between 1975 and 1979) 3.7 times as high as that of adolescents of the same age in 1984 who were born between 1966 and 1970 in the years before legalization.

Lott and Whitley

In 2001, John Lott and John Whitley argued that Donohue and Levitt believed that states with fully legalized abortion had higher abortion rates than states that allowed abortion only under certain conditions (this was the case in several states prior to judicial legalization) and that the statistics would not support this claim. In addition, if abortion caused a fall in the crime rate, then this decrease should first be observed in the youngest and then gradually decrease in the elderly and even older. In fact, however, the murder rate falls first among the oldest criminals and the somewhat younger ones, and so on until it finally falls only among the youngest. Lott and Whitley believe that if Donohue and Levitt were right, then 50 percent of the drop in the homicide rate during the 1990s was due to the legalization of abortion alone and that this should therefore be immediately visible from the diagrams without any further statistical corrections, which is what not applicable.

Joyce

Ted Joyce supports the thesis in his essay Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime? from 2004 countered a number of arguments. He claims that legal abortion in the early 1970s replaced illegal abortion without significantly increasing the rate of abortions between 1985 and 1990. Cohorts born prior to 1973 from states that legalized abortion in 1973 would have roughly the same crime rate as later born cohorts. Hidden variables would gloss over the results.

Donohue and Levitt responded to this criticism with the article Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce . They believe that none of Joyce's arguments cast doubt on their hypothesis. In addition, with this article they expanded their database to include more detailed statistics that Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute had made available to them in the meantime.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Levitt's opening ( memento of the original from October 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Sailer's reply , Levitt's reply and Sailer's reply at the end . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / slate.msn.com
  2. Jump up ↑ Lott, John R. and Whitley, John E: Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births (2001) , Yale Law & Economics Research Paper Number 254.
  3. ^ Ted Joyce: Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime? , Journal of Human Resources , 2004, Volume 39, Issue 1, Pages 1–28.
  4. ↑ Donohue and Levit: "Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce" (PDF; 318 kB) Journal of Human Resources , 2004, 39 (1), pages 29-49.

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