2) unwanted babies are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and
>are therefore at an increased risk for criminal involvement later in life.
Levitt does provide evidence for his idea that had these fetuses not been aborted, many would have grown up to be criminals on account of the long term psychological effects of their unwantedness. The idea, explicitly argued, thus seems to be less genetic determinism than misogyny: it's lack of mother' love, plus her smoking and drinking, that produces criminals (the criminal underclass remains a peculiarly gendered phenomenon in social science work as Adolph Reed, Jr has long noted); luckily it's just those bad mothers who abort--Levitt seems to be implying. They also just happen to be disproportionately minorities and impoverished people.
Now he does submit real evidence for the effects of unwantedness (though he does not show that unwantedness increases criminal propensity sufficiently that had these kids been born--even if they all turned out be truly unwanted--the crime rate would have been up to 20% higher; he does even try to quantify the effect, though he suggests it is the main causal pathway). But there is a study he cites:
"A number of studies have looked at cases of women, living in jurisdications in which govt approval to have an abortion was required, who sought to have an abortion, but were denied to the right to do so. Dagg (1991) reports that these women overwhelmingly kept their babies, rather than giving them up for adoption, but that they often resent the unwanted children and, perhaps because of feelings of depression and anger, were far less likely than other mothers to nurture, hold, and breastfeed their children. In an array of studies in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, Dagg found that the children who were born because their mothers were denied an abortion were substantially more likely to be involved in crime and have poorer life prospects, EVEN WHEN CONTROLLING FOR THE INCOME, AGE, EDUCATION, AND HEALTH OF THE MOTHER. This literature provides strong evidence that unwanted children are likely to be disproportionately involved in criminal activity, which may be the causal pathway from greater availability of abortion to lower rates of crime."
What's wrong with this study. as summarized here?
It does not control for the income of the child's family, only the mother's. It still could be that these women often wanted to abort because they were to be single mothers who may indeed make more or are more educated than individual women on average. The real problem here may be lack of father's and social support for the children single women decided to decided to abort, not that they were bad mothers who created demon spawn.
Second, these children's school and peer environment may be be more impoverished even when their mother does better on average than other women. It's hard to pinpoint the mother as the cause of criminality, no?
Third, we don't know if unwanted children are more often and easily given up for adoption in the US than in the countries studied here.
This Levitt study strikes me as quite silly. I do agree that the availability of abortion allows rational control over birthing decisions by women and this should allow for a better home environment for the children women choose to have. But the causal claim vis a vis crime reduction seems to me ridiculously and perniciously unmediated. We have an unmediated link here between bad mothers, popularly imagined to be what minority and poor women are, and demon spawn. This is prejudice, not social science.
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