Did Roe v. Wade cause the crime rate to drop in the 1990s

[quaoar]

That's the premise in a new book called Freakonomics.

Interestingly, I found this review of it in the Weekly Standard of all places that pretty much accepts that premise as gospel.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/570gfjke.asp?pg=2

FREAKONOMICS IS MOST LIKELY to become controversial (and perhaps notorious) because of its chapter on crime and abortion. During the first half of the 1990s, a bewildering variety of experts forecast that America would soon be engulfed in a virtual tsunami of crime.

Happily, these prophecies of doom proved wildly off base. To paraphrase an old saying, failure is an orphan but success begets a thousand politicians vying for the credit. In this case, there were several seemingly plausible explanations for the non-explosion (and indeed reduction) of crime. Some experts said Rudolph Giuliani's and William Bratton's innovative way of implementing Jams Q. Wilson's "broken window" theory of sociology saved the day. Others pointed to tougher gun laws. Still others suggested more policemen or more widespread use of capital punishment deserved the
credit.

While it was wonderful to believe that the aggressive removal of squeegee men or some other easily implemented--and therefore easily repeated--policy decision saved our society from the super-predators, perhaps the actual explanation for society's success in this struggle is more disquieting. Levitt convincingly argues that the fortuitous drop in crime of the late 1990s was due to 1973's Roe v. Wade decision.

Here is Levitt's theory boiled down to its essence: "Decades of study have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity . . . Just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet." Levitt goes on to support this assertion with an almost unassailable statistical analysis (although given the discomfiting nature of his argument, it is likely to be vigorously assailed nonetheless).

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. This has been around for years as a sick joke --

"They want to protect the fetuses now, so they can execute them later."

[applegrove]

3. Are you saying crime stats didn't go down i 1990s?

[applegrove]

2. Crime rate went down in Canada. I'd say it was more open parents who

taught their kids about sex and access to all forms of birth control in the 1970s.

[Sparkly]

4. I think the #1 factor affecting crime is poverty.

In the 1990s, economic conditions were good. Unemployment was low, educational opportunities were higher, and Clinton did a lot for urban communities, afterschool programs, "midnight basketball," etc...

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. There you go. The abortion rate is a red herring.

After all, how significant was RvW to the abortion rate? We don't really know because before then it was illegal -- but being done anyway. We didn't go from zero to 1.2 million, in '73. A better guess would be 750,000. Why did they call them "abortion mills" if they weren't cranking out the procedure in high numbers? How many of that 450,000 difference would have become criminals? Even as high as 10%, 45,000, is only a blip on the screen to a 'justice system' that processes 5 million a year and keeps better than 2 million in prison at any given time.

Poverty is the key, and worse, the gap between the haves and have nots. During the '80s the unions were broken, unemployment burgeoned, worker wages stagnated and CEO compensation skyrocketed. Crime went up. Of course, the CIA bringing crack to the urban community didn't help.

In the '90s the unions were still gutted, but unemployment dropped and worker wages rose. CEO compensation held steady for a time, as the examples of Michael Milken et al sunk in. Crime began to fall.

Now, the unions are mere shades, unemployment is the norm, the cost of living as outstripped worker wages for the last five years and CEOs are the new aristocracy -- the gilded age has returned.

And crime is again on the rise.