Abortion and Crime Rates

The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime by John J. Donohue, Steven D. Levitt :: SSRNHas the full text of a paper (Donohue, John J. and Levitt, Steven D., "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" (2000). Quarterly Journal of Economics) that is very interesting.Basically, it argues that the legalization of abortion caused about half of the decline in the crime rate that we have seen in the US over the last decade plus. They do a decent job of arguing it, I believe, and make a pretty convincing case.If anyone disagrees with their conclusions after reading the article I'd be interested in seeing your objections. When I googled for some dissenting views I saw Sailer's position, which I thought seemed unsupported by the evidence, and a bunch of pro-life groups dodging the issue, so I'd be curious as to what else is out there.A) Should we let practical considerations (like this) influence moral decisions (like abortion)?B) How close is this to eugenics?I realize that its the result of many individual mothers making decisions for their own personal reasons, so its not at all like my own states Racial Integrity Act or the Nazi T-4 program or anything like that, but it does seem somewhat similar.Chris

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Erm...since when did correlation mean causation???? All this study shows is that there MAY be a correlation between crime rates and abortion. It certainly doesn't show that one causes the other.

Unless I'm mistaken, it shows a correlation between the legalization of abortion and crime rates. I have trouble imagining an unknown third factor that would both compel lawmakers to legalize abortion and compel citizens to commit less crimes. From the abstract:

quote:

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We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

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So - the drop in crime always occurs after the legalization of abortion. After high rates of abortion, crime falls among those people whose mothers did not choose to have abortions.I would like, however, two additional pieces of information - crime rates adjusted by capita (if there's less overall crime, perhaps its related to the population-reducing effects of abortion) and the socio-economic aspects of abortion - which women are more likely to abort.If what they're saying is that the women who abort tend to be mostly people who would be bringing children into a socioeconomic level more likely to pressure them into committing crimes (certain crimes?), well, that's certainly reasonable. But I'd like to see more data, you know?At any rate it certainly lets the air out of the old "but maybe we're aborting the next Mozart" argument, you know?

Absolutely correct. Heheheh... ahhhh this is the challenge of understanding the difference between correlation and causation. What could the other factors be?Well what would lawmakers legalizing abortion usually coincide with? It would seem that would coincide with a more liberal populace in general. That is the population is liberalizing and so put the kinds of people into office that would make abortion legal. Liberalization has correlative ties to education, which also has ties to general welfare.It could be that the nation as a whole was improving and it just so happens that at the same time, some liberal laws were passed regarding abortion a generation earlier. Or that with an increase in liberalization in general less crimes were commited or reported.It should be noted that the period of the early 70's involved the repeal or liberalization of many different aspects of the law... not just abortion. Civil Rights had just been won and yet needed more reinforcement over the years. That could explain the 18 years between law A passing and the effects X (from something else) seen.It could also be that crime prevention improved or that arrests had become more effective in putting people away. It is certainly true that during this period of time where effects were seen (late 80's to 90's) our nation was turning into a prison state and locking up a higher percentage of its population than it ever had, or that any other nation does. Less criminals on the streets does tend to lower crime rates.The fact is it may not just be a third factor which compelled legalization of abortion and lowered crime, but a third and fourth factor each completely separate yet coincidentally creating a correlation between abortion and crime.Don't take this as me picking on you, or trying to suggest you are wrong. I'm only using your particular post as the springboard to answer the question because you identified what correlation was seen and raised the question of third factors.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

I thought about that, but that would be the reverse trend - legalization of abortion would follow the decrease in crime of a more liberal society. Not preceed it.The very interesting thing in the abstract was that most of the decrease in crime rates is among the population born after the legalization. 18 years, though, is the age at which the crimes you commit become a part of the public record.At this point I see the explanation that abortion prevents the births of people whose circumstances or genetics would make them more likely to commit crimes as the simplest of the alternatives. It explains all the data. If there's evidence of third or fourth proximate causes, then by all means we should seek them out, but what we're doing here is just ad-hoc speculating.

While that could be true that is not necessarily so. It depends on what degree of liberalization is required to get abortion support under law, and what degree of liberalization is needed for lowered crime (due to better circumstances in general).Again, it may even be that there came to be less laws in general (and so less crimes), or that people were less likely to report crimes, or that the government actually improved its means of removing criminals and keeping them off the streets (or returning to crime through rehabilitation).Indeed both better policing and detention and rehabilitation techniques were beginning to improve at the end of the 60's and up through the 90's. What might me interesting to see then is not that the crime rates have fallen, but specifically that 18 year olds (at the 18 year mark after legalization) were commiting less crimes, while the older crowd continued to commit the same level of crimes. Unfortunately it is much too simple. The 60-70's were turbulent times which changed many laws, the education of children in general, as well as how crime was approached.It could simply be that we are seeing the fruits of improvements in society, rather than that abortion is hitting the people most likely to become criminals. That such fruits occur 18 years after the legalization of abortion appears more like coincidence given the vast amount of other societal changes which occured during those 18 years.I am also interested if the drops were shown to be precipitous and then constant. That would at least be more suggestive of something. If it was simply part of an downward trend, especially one that continues, it is not so interesting.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

That is what the paper claims is happening. Section V (starting on page 30 of the PDF) is where they lay out their argument that this is what is happening.Chris

I would suggest that it requires a very liberal society to get legislative support for abortion rights. For as long as I've been alive the victories in the abortion battle have mostly been judicial, not legislative. That appears to be what the abstract suggests. What data doesn't it explain?

Thanks for the catch. While it is interesting to see that they say this may be happening, if you notice within the description of the evidence they have they note that it is not exactly matching (that is they end up explaining why it differs from exact predictions).However, yes, this was a more important data to have included and I should have read through the whole thing completely before making a suggestion for improvements.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

Yep, my mistake. Someone else caught this as well. I had not read the whole thing through. I will note that if you look at their discussion of looking at cohort data, they find that it does not fall necessarily with prediction. They end up giving reasons for the discrepancies as well as dismissing the fact that older cohorts do not completely live up to projection as well. Oh, it's not that it doesn't explain a possible connection between data they examined. I do think it is a valid theory. The problem is what data it did not include as possibly connected to the data they examined.Here is one big for instance. They dismiss the connection between economic health and crime based on a referenced study. While the fact that a study shows it might not have an effect can give you reason not to expect to see such a connection, it does not give one clearance to not test that possibility.Take a look at both Table 1 and Figure 1, the data within them fit almost perfectly with diagrams recording the US economy. The economy worsened in the seventies until 1980 when it improved up till about 1985-6 where it tanked until about 1991-2 when it rebounded and held onto prosperity through Clinton's terms. Does the crime data not fit the economic model of crime correlation/causation to a T?Instead of dismissing such an analysis based on a study, they should have run the analysis and showed that it did not hold in this case. I simply do not see that at all. Infact it really looks like a tight correlation.That would make sense too given their description of what goes makes people prone to crime. Obviously as the economy tanks more families end up in stress and thus negative household environments are generated as well as a reason to commit crimes.I would also ask (since the mention it in their concluding paragraph) why they did not run an analysis based on improved birth control methods. If lowered rates of unwanted births are the key to lowered crime then we should theoretically see some impact starting in 1978, 18 years after the pill began in the US. After all it is credited with helping generate the sexual revolution. Why would there have been no effects seen (and this must be the case since if it did then their data should have been skewed by it)?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

Oh, I'm sure there's some relevant data that they could have gathered, but simply didn't think to.But I think it's jumping the gun to try to develop theory to explain data that we haven't gathered yet. But the economy isn't uniform. Some states do better than others; some industries do better than others. The economy isn't simply one number we can look at that typefies conditions for all Americans.Show me the corellation between local economy and local crime, as they did between local abortion avaliability and local crime, and I'll pay attention. And I absolutely agree. I'm sure that economic aspects affect crime. But a general corellation between average national economic "goodness" (I'm not sure what aspect of the economy you're referring to) and average national crime rates doesn't preclude a causal connection between abortion and crime, as well.

Actually that is exactly what one needs to do in order to figure out ways of falsifying the initial theory. You did notice that they didn't really run any alternative investigations which could have falsified the sole abortion-crime causation model? They simply mentioned the other possibilities and then stated what studies they saw which indicate it is unlikely such causative relations could be found. It really was their duty to check into these alternative theories before making a concrete statement regarding their findings.Here is an interesting statistic, increasing sales of ice cream are correlated tightly with increased rates of drowning. Now I can easily come up with a theory that people are eating ice cream and getting cramps and drowning, I can then show that this statistical connection holds on the state and city level.The fact that I do not collect any other data does not mean that someone cannot build another theory about why we see this correlation. Someone could very well (without collecting data) reason that a possible explanation is that more people go swimming and eat ice cream when it is hot out, thus when people are eating ice cream (especially increases in ice cream consumption) more people are likely swimming which increases the possibility and actuality of people drowning. Well I'm not going to because that is something they are going to have to do to make their case. Right now it is clear that on a national level crime stats mirrored economy (income/unemployment/debt). Just because they picked up some state stats for abortion and I do not have the state stats on economic issues, does not make my point less valid.You asked what third element could have affected both, I have supplied one. There were others they mentioned as possibilities (a couple the same that I mentioned) and they did not follow through with actual data to disconfirm those causative possibilities. Blaming me for not disproving their theory is kind of missing the target you should be aiming at. While they have some interesting correlations, perhaps even suggestive, they have not done the work necessary to prove that correlation means something.If there is anything I got out of my sociology classes (especially the research methods ones) it is that you have to be extremely critical when looking at any study which purports to have found a causal connection. It is their duty to investigate likely alternative relationships, not yours.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)