Aborted Crime

I just finished reading an article from The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Vol. 116, Issue 2, 2001). The title of the article is: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime/John Donohue and Steven Levitt (authors). Their theory was interesting, the legalization of abortion in the United States following the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973 had the unintended consequence of resulting in dramatic lowering of crime rates in the United States. Even more interesting, they showed that five states the legalized abortion 3 years earlier than the rest of the US experienced crime declines in the 1990s faster and greater than rest of the nation.

The underlying story is that the legalization of abortion allowed women who would not have been able to provide a good environment for the child an alternative (in other sense, future criminals were aborted). The authors cited numerous studies that unwanted children belong to the group with the highest risk of criminal activity later in their life. Their findings cast doubt on popular explanations on why crime declined in the 1990s (these explanations included: aging of the population, growth in the economy, increase number of police, and improved policing methods).

One of the authors, Steven Levitt was the recepient of the 2003 John Bates Clark medal (awarded every 2 years to the best economist under 40 by the American Economic Association) he is also a co-author of a recently released bestseller: Freakonomics.