Study: Abortion Might Not Cut Crime Rates After All

WFB: Using data from the rise and fall of communism in Romania, a new paper suggests that abortion’s effect on crime is minimal, once its effect on population size is properly accounted for.

The paper, authored by economists Randi Hjalmarsson, Andreea Mitrut, and Cristian Pop-Eleches, looks at sudden changes in Romanian abortion law during and after the Ceaușescu regime. It shows that while overall numbers of crimes rose and fell in line with abortion, this effect vanishes when adjusting for the size of the population. This conclusion challenges prevailing explanations, including the idea that abortion reduces the number of “unwanted” children who might otherwise commit crimes.

The proposed link between abortion and crime has a long, and fraught, history. Back in 2001, economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt (the latter of Freakonomics fame) released a paper arguing that the legalization of abortion — first in specific states, and then nationwide via Roe v. Wade — drove the massive decline in crime from 1995 onwards, as children who would have been in their teens and early-to-mid 20s—a high-crime age range—simply were never born. They contended that this abortion effect accounts for up to 50 percent of the overall drop.

Donohue and Levitt argued that abortion affects crime through two mechanisms. One is cohort size — if there are fewer kids, there will be fewer crimes in absolute terms. The other one, that the pair described as “far more interesting,” is selection, i.e. “the possibility that abortion has a disproportionate effect on the births of those who are most at risk of engaging in criminal behavior.”

In other words, the legalization of abortion may have led to the abortion of children who were otherwise more likely to grow up to commit crime. This hypothesis — which implies that abortion benefits society by removing crime-prone people, who are in turn more likely to be low-socioeconomic status — has been derided by critics as eugenicist and racist.

Unsurprisingly, Donohue and Levitt’s paper attracted a great deal of criticism, and a complex debate about methodological choices ensued. One of the criticisms, from economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, argues that among other issues Donohue and Levitt look only at absolute levels of crime, not rates of crime per capita.

Donohue and Levitt also recently updated their original paper, claiming similarly strong effects of abortion on crime using the same contested methodology.

According to Hjalmarsson and her team, when Foote and Goetz used crime rates, they found that “there is no evidence of a selection effect of abortion on crime, and one cannot even conclude that there is evidence of a cohort size effect.” Subsequent research found selection effects for crime rates as well as levels, but conceded that “most of that relationship appears to reflect cohort size effects rather than selection.”

With this debate still ongoing, the new paper makes a novel contribution by looking at another country entirely, Romania. In October of 1966, shortly after taking power, communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion throughout the country. Several decades later, following Ceaușescu’s untimely demise and the end of communist rule, abortion was re-legalized. Today, Romania still has one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. read more