"Legalized Abortion and Crime"
BY: JOHN J. DONOHUE
Stanford Law School
STEVEN D. LEVITT
University of Chicago
American Bar Foundation
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=174508
Paper ID: Stanford Law School, Public Law and Legal Theory
Working Paper No. 1
Date: June 1999
Contact: JOHN J. DONOHUE
Email: Mailto:jjd at stanford.edu
Postal: Stanford Law School
Alvarado Row & Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610 USA
Phone: (650)723-0290
Fax: (650)725-0253
Co-Auth: STEVEN D. LEVITT
Email: Mailto:slevitt at midway.uchicago.edu
Postal: University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
ABSTRACT:
Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many
explanations for this decline have been offered, each of them
has difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude,
persistence, and widespread nature of the drop. In this paper we
propose a new explanation for falling crime: the legalization of
abortion roughly twenty years earlier. The empirical evidence we
present is consistent with abortion playing an important role.
First, the timing of the crime drop corresponds to the period in
which the first cohorts affected by abortion are reaching the
peak ages of criminal activity. Second, states that legalized
abortion before the rest of the nation were the first to
experience decreasing crime. Third, states with high abortion
rates have seen a greater fall in crime since 1985. The
estimated elasticity of crime with respect to abortion rates is
roughly -.10. The abortion-related reduction in crime is
predominantly attributable to a decrease in crime per capita
among the young, rather than smaller cohort sizes. Declining
crime rates could result from two mechanisms: selective abortion
on the part of women most at risk to have children who would
engage in criminal activity, and improved child rearing or
environmental circumstances caused by better maternal, familial,
or fetal circumstances. Extrapolating our estimates out of
sample to a counterfactual in which there were no abortions,
crime rates might be 10-20 percent higher than they currently
are with abortion. If these estimates are correct, legalized
abortion can explain about half of the recent fall in crime. All
else equal, we predict that crime rates will continue to fall
slowly for an additional 15-20 years as the full effects of
legalized abortion are gradually felt.