Since the early 1990s crime has fallen annually in the U.S., last year by about 7%. Many explanations have been put forward for this drop: more police walk the beat, more people are in prison, the economy has improved, crack use has fallen, alarms and guards are now widespread. The emphasis given to any one of these rationales varies, of course, according to philosophical bent or political expediency. In New York City, for instance, plummeting crime has been attributed to improved policing.
Yet the decline exists even in cities that have not altered their approach, such as Los Angeles.
The above explanations are unsatisfactory to many researchers, among them two economists who have studied crime. Steven D. Levitt of the University of Chicago and John J. Donohue III, currently at Yale University, have proffered an alternative reason: the legalization of abortion in 1973 reduced the number of unwanted children--that is, children more likely to become criminals.
In 1992, the first year crime began to fall, the first set of children born after 1973 turned 18.
Because most crimes are committed by young adult males between the ages of 18 and 24, Levitt and Donohue argue that the absence of millions of unwanted children led to fewer crimes being done by that age group. In total, the researchers maintain, the advent of legal abortion may be responsible for up to 50% of the drop in crime.
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Indeed, Levitt and Donohue are not the first to connect crime and abortion. As they note in their paper, a former Minneapolis police chief made the same suggestion several years ago. But they are the first to examine data to determine whether there could be a correlation. They looked at how crime rates differed for states that legalized abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade: New York, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.
In those states, crime began to drop a few years before it did in the rest of the country, and states with higher abortion rates have had steeper drops in crime. Fewer unwanted children, the two conclude, ultimately means fewer crimes.
CRIME RATES dropped after 1991, just when children born after Roe v. Wade would be reaching 18.