Abortion and crime

Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that various factors have contributed to the surprising decline in crime rates during and since the 1990s, but among these is the legalization of abortion. According to the reviewer in TNR, “After abortion was legalized, a number of likely criminals were not allowed to be born in teh 1970s, and as a result the crime rate went down twenty years later. Levitt’s striking conclusion is that legalized abortion played a much larger role than capital punishment in reducing the rate of violent crime” – or violent crime was reduced by a preemptive enforcement of capital punishment. Levitt’s analysis is not without its weaknesses: It is difficult to know for sure, as the reviewer points out, what happened to the abortion rates following Roe. Perhaps illegal abortions were nearly as widespread as later legal ones. But the connection is a suggestive one, and it certainly is plausible that many women who were willing to kill their babies would have raised killers.