The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime

The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime ( German about The impact of legalized abortion on crime rates ) is a controversial study by John Donohue of Yale University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago in the year 2001. She claims that legalization of abortion in the United States in the 1970s had brought into the United States to a significant drop in crime in the 1990s.

The font from the Quarterly Journal of Economics argues that the falling crime rate of the 1990s had been brought about mainly by the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Critical reception

Sailer

1999, even before the essay was published ensued a debate between journalist Steve Sailer on one side and Steven Levitt on the other side on Slate.com. Sailer argues that the decrease in the crack distribution in the United States was more significant than abortion and that, contrary to what would be expected Levitt's thesis, the murder rate for the 14 - to 17 -year-olds in 1993 ( the were born in the weddings of abortion between 1975 and 1979 ) was 3.7 times as high as that of the young people of the same age in 1984, who had been born in the years before the legalization 1966-1970.

Lott and Whitley

2001 argued John Lott and John Whitley that Donohue and Levitt annähmen that states with completely legalized abortion higher abortion rates were as states in which abortion is permitted only under certain conditions ( This was the case before the judicial legalization in several states ) and the statistics would not support that finding. In addition, if the abortion would cause a fall in the crime rate, this reduction would first be observed in the youngest and then gradually occur a reduction in the elderly and even the elderly. In fact, the murder rate fall it begins with the oldest criminals and the somewhat younger and so on until at last they fall only at the youngest. Lott and Whitley argue that if Donohue and Levitt would be right that 50 percent of the drop in the murder rate had been made during the 1990s alone, due to the legalization of abortion then and therefore, this should be visible without further statistical corrections immediately from the charts, but what is not zutreffe.

Joyce

Ted Joyce holds the thesis in his essay Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime? from 2004, a number of arguments against. He claims that legal abortion in the early 1970s have replaced the illegal abortion, without leading to a significant increase in the rate of adoption between 1985 and 1990. Cohorts who were born before 1973 and came from part states where abortion was legalized in 1973 would, born about the same crime rate as cohorts of later. Secretive variables would gloss over the results.

Donohue and Levitt responded to this criticism with the essay Further Evidence did Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce. They are of the opinion that none of the arguments of Joyce doubt could give rise to their hypothesis. In addition, they expanded this essay their data base to provide more detailed statistics that had them Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute is now provided.