THE
QUARTERLY JOURNALOF ECONOMICS
Vol. CXVI May 2001 Issue 2
THE IMPACT OF LEGALIZED ABORTION ON CRIME*J
OHN
J. D
ONOHUE
III
AND
S
TEVEN
D. L
EVITT
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed signicantly torecent crime reductions.Crime began to fall roughly eighteenyears after abortionlegalization. The ve states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declinesearlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with
Roe v. Wade.
States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crimereductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born afterabortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion ap-pears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.
I. I
NTRODUCTION
Since 1991, the United States has experienced the sharpestdrop in murder rates since the end of Prohibition in 1933. Homi-cide rates have fallen more than 40 percent. Violent crime andproperty crime have each declined more than 30 percent. Hun-dreds of articles discussing this change have appeared in theacademic literature and popular press.
1
They have offered anarray of explanations: the increasing use of incarceration, growth
* Wewouldliketo thankIanAyres,Gary Becker,CarlBell,AlfredBlumstein,Jonathan Caulkins, Richard Craswell, George Fisher, Richard Freeman, JamesHeckman, Christine Jolls, Theodore Joyce, Louis Kaplow, Lawrence Katz, JohnKennan, John Monahan, Casey Mulligan, Derek Neal, Eric Posner, RichardPosner, Sherwin Rosen, Steve Sailer, Jose´Scheinkman, Peter Siegelman, Kenji Yoshino,and seminarparticipants too numerousto mentionfor helpful commentsand discussions. Craig Estes and Rose Francis provided exceptionally valuableresearch assistance. Correspondence can be addressed to either John Donohue,Crown Quadrangle, Stanford Law School, Stanford, CA 94305, or Steven Levitt,Departmentof Economics, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago,IL60637. Email: jjd@stanford.edu; slevitt@midway.uchicago.edu.1. For a sampling of the academic literature, see Blumstein and Wallman[2000] and the articles appearing in the 1998 Summer issue (Volume 88) of the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
especially Blumstein and Rosenfeld[1998], Kelling and Bratton [1998], and Donohue [1998]. See Buttereld [1997a,
©
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
May 2001
379
in the number of police, improved policing strategies such asthose adopted in New York, declines in the crack cocaine trade,the strong economy, and increased expenditures on victim pre-cautions such as security guards and alarms.None of these factors, however, can provide an entirely sat-isfactory explanation for the large, widespread, and persistentdrop in crime in the 1990s. Some of these trends, such as theincreasing scale of imprisonment, the rise in police, and expendi-tures on victim precaution, have been ongoing for over two de-cades, and thus cannot plausibly explain the recent abrupt im-provement in crime. Moreover, the widespread nature of thecrimedrop arguesagainst explanationssuch as improvedpolicingtechniques since many cities that have not improved their policeforces (e.g., Los Angeles) have nonetheless seen enormous crimedeclines. A similar argument holds for crack cocaine. Many areasof the country that have never had a pronounced crack trade (forinstance, suburban and rural areas) have nonetheless experi-enced substantial decreases in crime. Finally, although a strongeconomy is supercially consistent with the drop in crime since1991, previous researchhas established only a weak link betweeneconomic performance and violent crime [Freeman 1995] and inone case even suggested that murder rates might vary procycli-cally [Ruhm 2000].While acknowledging that all of these factors may have alsoserved to dampen crime, we consider a novel explanation for thesudden crime drop of the 1990s: the decision to legalize abortionover a quarter century ago.
2
The Supreme Court’s 1973 decisionin
Roe v. Wade
legalizing abortion nationwide potentially ts thecriteria for explaining a large, abrupt, and continuing decrease incrime.The sheermagnitude ofthe numberofabortions performedsatises the rst criterion that any shock underlying the recentdrop in crime must be substantial. Seven years after
Roe v. Wade,
over 1.6 million abortions were being performed annually—al-most one abortion for every two live births. Moreover, the legal-
1997b, 1999] for a selection of articles appearing in
The New York Times
andFletcher [2000] for a recent article in
The Washington Post.
2. We are unaware of any scholarly article that has examinedthis effect. Wehave recently learned, however, that the former police chief of Minneapolis haswritten that abortion is “arguably the only effective crime-prevention deviceadopted in this nation since the late 1960s” [Bouza 1990]. In his subsequent1994gubernatorial campaign, Bouza was attacked for this opinion [Short 1994]. Im-mediately after Bouza’s view was publicized just prior to the election, Bouza fellsharply in the polls.
380
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
ization of abortion in ve states in 1970, and then for the nationas a whole in 1973, were abrupt legal developments that mightplausibly have a similarly abrupt inuence 15–20 years laterwhen the cohorts born in the wake of liberalized abortion wouldstart reaching their high-crime years. Finally, any inuence of achange in abortion would impact crime cumulatively as succes-sive affected cohorts entered into their high-crime late adolescentyears, providing a reason why crime has continued to fall yearafter year.Legalized abortion may lead to reduced crime either throughreductions in cohort sizes or through lower per capita offendingrates for affected cohorts. The smaller cohort that results fromabortion legalization means that when that cohort reaches thelate teens and twenties, there will be fewer young males in theirhighest-crime years, and thus less crime. More interesting andimportant is the possibility that children born after abortionlegalization may on average have lower subsequent rates of crim-inality for eitheroftwo reasons.First, womenwho have abortionsare those most at risk to give birth to children who would engagein criminal activity. Teenagers, unmarried women, and the eco-nomically disadvantaged are all substantially more likely to seekabortions [Levine et al. 1996]. Recent studies have found childrenborn to these mothersto be at higher risk for committing crime inadolescence [Comanor and Phillips 1999]. Gruber, Levine, andStaiger [1999], in the paper most similar to ours, document thatthe early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difcult along many dimensions: infant mortality,growing up in a single-parent family, and experiencing poverty.Second, women may use abortion to optimize the timing of child-bearing. A given woman’s ability to provide a nurturing environ-ment to a child can uctuate overtime depending on the woman’sage, education, and income, as well as the presence of a father inthe child’s life, whether the pregnancy is wanted, and any drug oralcohol abuse both in utero and after the birth. Consequently,legalized abortion provides a woman the opportunity to delaychildbearing if the current conditions are suboptimal. Even if lifetime fertility remains constant for all women, children areborn into better environments, and future criminality is likely tobe reduced. A number of anecdotal empirical facts support the existenceand magnitude ofthe crime-reducingimpact ofabortion.First, wesee a broad consistency with the timing of legalization of abortion381
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