Abortions Don't Mean Drop in Crime
by George Will

[Pro-Life Infonet Note: George Will is a nationally syndicated pro-life
columnist and a frequent guest on news/talk television programs.]

John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt are not in the least like Capt.
Gonzalo de Aguilera. Before considering who Donohue and Levitt are,
consider who the captain was. He was a polo-playing ex-cavalry officer
selected by General Franco as a press liaison during the Spanish Civil
War. He said the fundamental cause of the war was "the introduction of
modern drainage. Prior to this, the riffraff had been killed by various
useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves."
And: "Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao, all these Red
leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble
and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should
destroy the sewers."

DONOHUE AND LEVITT, law professors at Stanford and the University of
Chicago respectively, say: "Legalized abortion contributed significantly
to recent crime reductions."

In their paper for Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics they do not
recommend abortion as anti-crime policy. Rather, they explore, as social
scientists do, whether causation explains a correlation. This one: "Crime
began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization."

Since 1991 -- 18 years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion -- murder
rates have fallen faster than at any time since the end of Prohibition in
1933. Homicide rates are down 40 percent, violent crime and property crime
are down 30 percent. The five states (New York, California, Washington,
Hawaii, Alaska) that legalized abortion earlier experienced earlier
declines in crime. And states with especially high abortion rates in the
1970s and 1980s had especially dramatic crime reductions in the 1990s.

Donohue and Levitt consider the many variables besides abortion that could
explain declining crime -- more incarceration, more and better-used
police, reduction of the crack-cocaine trade, more victim protections
(security guards and alarms), a strong economy. But many cities that have
not improved their police have had reductions in crime. Crime has fallen
even where there never was a substantial crack trade. And research has not
established a strong link between economic performance and violent crime.
After controlling for such factors, Donohue and Levitt conclude:
"Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the
recent drop in crime."

And why not? Even if you think, as pro-abortion people do, that killing 27
million unborn babies (or, as some pro-abortion people put it, causing 27
million clumps of "fetal material" to "undergo demise") in 18 years is a
morally negligible matter, it is not a minor social development. Abortion
obviously has reduced the size of the high-crime cohort -- young males.
Less obvious, but even more important, there is a "selective-abortion"
effect and an "improved-environment" effect. These matter because 6
percent of any birth cohort commits about half of that cohort's crimes.

There is a "selective-abortion" effect when a disproportionate number of
women having abortions are particularly likely to give birth to children
who would have a higher than usual propensity for criminal behavior.
Abortions are not distributed evenly across the entire population of
pregnant women. Unmarried and poor women and teenage girls are
"substantially more likely" to have abortions, and children born to such
mothers have a higher than normal probability of committing crimes in the
peak ages for crime, 18-24.

The "improved-environment" effect can occur when women use abortion "to
optimize the timing of childbearing." A woman's willingness or ability to
provide a nurturing environment may vary with her age, education, income,
avoidance of drug and alcohol abuse, and the presence of a father. The
likelihood of future criminality declines if children are born into better
environments. Teenagers and unmarried and poor women are most likely to
consider a pregnancy unwanted, and unintended pregnancies are associated
with poor prenatal care, greater smoking and drinking during pregnancy,
lower birth weights and other injuries to life chances.

Now, nothing in the Donohue-Levitt paper is shocking, or even
counterintuitive. However, given the way professional race-mongers poison
public discourse nowadays, Donohue and Levitt should brace themselves for
ritualistic charges that they are racists urging eugenics.

This, because they report research showing, not surprisingly, that after
1973 the drop in births was not uniform across all racial, ethnic and
social groups. While the sudden availability of abortion had only modest
effects on the fertility of white women, it coincided with large
reductions in teen fertility and teen out-of-wedlock fertility among
blacks. And Donohue and Levitt come to common-sense conclusions like this:
"Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher
than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of
abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

But Donohue and Levitt are no more advocating abortion than Galileo was
"advocating" planetary motion. Which is not to say that their social
science is as nonnormative as astronomy.

One problematic aspect of their analysis is their term "unwantedness."
They report evidence that mothers of "unwanted" children are less likely
than other mothers to hold, nurture and breast-feed those children.
However, the term "unwanted" is not applicable to all children born of
unwanted pregnancies. Unplanned children, even those resented in advance,
can often elicit parental love when born.

Furthermore, here is a pertinent question, albeit one difficult to
research: Does the policy of abortion-on-demand, which reduces children to
"choices" and pregnancies to casually disposable inconveniences,
contribute to the mentality that does make many children -- not just
pregnancies -- "unwanted" by their mothers? In which case, the abortion
culture itself is an incubator of crime. If this and other issues raised
by the Donohue-Levitt paper make people uncomfortable, good.