Prominent pro-abortion groups and leaders immediately picked up on the Donohue-Levitt study`s conclusion and used it as justification to promote and fund abortion practice. For example, in 2001, Canadian abortion expert Henry Morgentaler declared a moral justification in a ruthless commentary titled “It`s Better for Us That They Are Dead,” complaining that he had been making this claim for decades.3 As Donohue and Levitt explain in their article, “There should be little or no impact of abortion on pre-1985 criminality. Because actual abortion rates were extremely low in 1985. even in states where abortion is high. Critics have argued that Donohue and Levitt`s methods are flawed and that no statistically significant link between abortion and subsequent crime rates can be demonstrated. [1] [2] [3] Among the criticisms is the hypothesis in the Donohue-Levitt study that abortion rates have increased since Roe v. Waten; Critics use census data to show that changes in the overall abortion rate could not explain the decline in crime claimed by the study`s methodology (legal abortions had already been allowed in many states under limited circumstances). Other critics note that the correlations between births and crime found by Donohue-Levitt do not sufficiently account for confounding factors such as reduced drug use, demographic changes and population density, or other contemporary cultural changes. The correlation between abortion and rising crime rates assumes that a child cannot choose whether or not to become a criminal. Professor Donohue has been one of the principal empirical researchers at the Faculty of Law for the past 30 years. As an economist and jurist, Professor Donohue is known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in various areas, including civil and anti-discrimination law, workplace discrimination, criminal justice and the death penalty, as well as factors that influence crime, such as firearms.
incarceration, policing, and legalized abortion. The researchers also observed a decrease in the youth crime rate. Youth aged 18 to 24 are more criminally active than any other age group. When the number of 18- to 24-year-olds decreases, whether because of a lower birth rate or some other event, the number of crimes also decreases. But Levitt and Donohue identified a decline in crime rates in this age group, signaling that there was more to this decline than a decrease in population. “It is estimated that legalizing abortion reduced violent crime by 47 percent and property crime by 33 percent over this period, accounting for most of the observed decline in crime,” Donohue and Levitt write. “Modern econometrics focuses on examining the very sharp changes in the variables that underlie your analysis,” said Theodore Joyce, an economics professor at Baruch College whose research on abortion has been published in several academic journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Political Economy. “In other words, you`re looking for really sharp breaks because you can isolate what`s changed and whether something moves when it moves. If you have smooth changes, smooth changes in employment, crime, demographics — abortion is part of that soft change as you enter the 80s, 90s and 2000s — you can`t distinguish abortion from other things that were happening back then. Levitt co-authored the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics, in which he reiterated his thesis that abortion legalization is responsible for half of the recent decline in violent crime. John J. Donohue III, a professor at Stanford Law School, and Steven D.
Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, sparked a debate last August when they published a study on the relationship between abortion and crime. Their findings suggest that legal abortions prevented the birth of many potential criminals. According to their research, the absence of these individuals is responsible for at least half of the dramatic decline in crime rates between 1991 and 1997. Similarly, a 2015 study published in Crime and Delinquency notes that “while there is a statistically significant association between crime and abortion, it is due to varying concentrations of teenage abortions across states, not unwanted pregnancy.” There were many other fundamental problems with the conclusion that legalized abortion and a decline in crime rates are linked: “There are many reasons why crime in New York might decrease relative to crime in Utah,” said Christopher Foote, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. in May 2019. You can try to control what happens with unemployment and beer sales, but at the end of the day, you`re never really sure that a state like New York is better prepared to thrive in the new economy than maybe Oklahoma, so maybe there are other types of people moving to New York than Oklahoma. There are all sorts of other factors that you can`t take into account when making this state-to-state comparison. The researchers believed that the huge increase in violent crime, which peaked in 1991 and then began to decline, was more closely related to the crack epidemic, not abortion.