The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime

"The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" is a controversial paper by Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University. The paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2001, offers evidence that the falling United States crime rates of the 1990s were in part caused by the legalization of abortion due to the Roe v. Wade court decision of 1973.

Abstract
"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.

Criticism
Economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz published a criticism of Levitt's use of data, concluding that "There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term."

Ted Joyce has published a paper that refutes Levitt's and Donohue's research, and instead suggests that the decline is "likely the result of unmeasured period effects such as changes in crack cocaine use." Donohue and Levitt reply, stating, "Joyce’s failure to uncover a negative relationship between abortion and crime is a consequence of his decision to focus almost exclusively on one nonrepresentative six-year period during the peak of the crack epidemic."