Is there a link between abortion and crime ?

[ShadesWolf]

I thought this was an interest subject to talk about

What is the effect of abortion on crime ?

[Rodion Romanovich]

Apparently, there's 63% correlation between murders per capita and number of abortions per capita on a per nation basis:
http://www.nationmaster.com/correlat...ers-per-capita
but 63% correlation is a quite weak correlation, plus the per nation makes it a bit flawed

[Shaun]

I think that this link is just a ploy made up by the right wing conservtive Christians to try and put us filthy immoral left wingers who have pre marital sex down.

[Lemur]

The biggest theory about correlation between abortion and crime is the one put forward in Freakonomics, which states that the legalization of abortion in the early '70s was causal for the crime drop in the nineties. I'm too lazy to summarize, so I'll quote:

Donohue and Levitt use statistics to point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicate that crime started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted aborted children, following legalisation in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.

The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier and more widespread should have the largest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade.

Found a better summation, by Orson Scott Card.

When the crime rate started dropping in the 1990s, it took everyone by surprise. All the experts had predicted that crime would continue to rise in the radical way it had during the 1970s and 1980s.

Experts were talking about how we'd have to adapt to a society dominated by fear, living in gated communities, paying for far more prisons and police forces.

And then ...

It didn't happen. Instead, crime rates started to fall. All kinds of crime, across the board. And not just in one place, in many places.

Why Did Crime Rates Fall?

The innovative policework in New York City was given much of the credit, but the same thing was happening in cities with no new theories or practices.

All kinds of theories were advanced, but they all fell apart against statistical realities -- none of them explained why crime rates fell at exactly the time they began to fall.

Except for one explanation. Abortion.

Try to set aside your personal opinions about abortion and let's look at history.

In 1973, Roe v. Wade made abortion permissible throughout the United States. The floodgates opened, and vast numbers of abortions were performed. As a result, vast numbers of children were not born.

Ah, but which children? The vast majority of the abortions were among women who would have been raising their children without a father; substantial numbers of these women were addicts. And even the abortions performed on middle-class women were somewhat more likely to be the result of liaisons in which one partner or the other, or both, had poor impulse control.

In other words, the fetuses that were aborted, had they been born, would have become children who were statistically the most likely group to become criminals. Raised by single mothers, in poverty, with genes that might not provide them with much ability to foresee the longterm consequences of impulsive actions.

The crime rates began falling exactly when that generation of children would have reached adolescence and those with such tendencies would have begun their criminal careers.

It certainly looked as if we killed off much of our criminal class in the womb.

Proving Cause and Effect

Of course, a causal assertion like that is hard to prove -- though people make even more sweeping assertions on less evidence all the time. But we're far more likely to accept, without evidence, the causal assertions that fit our beliefs. Those that don't fit, we try hard to ignore.

This one doesn't fit anybody's beliefs. The pro-abortion group is generally on the Left, and if you had tried, in 1973, to introduce abortion as a means of killing off the criminal class of the 1990s and 2000s, they would have opposed it.

Likewise, anti-abortionists tend to be among those who are concerned about law-and-order issues. But if, in 1973, you had proposed that the most effective longterm crime-control measure would be to allow abortion, I doubt that many anti-abortionists would have been persuaded that this was a good idea.

Why? Because it's eugenics, plain and simple. Hitlerian logic. Purifying the race by preventing the birth of the class of people who are most likely to degrade the quality of life for the rest of us.

So few would have dared even suggest such a thing in 1973; but a group of judges decided to perform this eugenics experiment on the American people, and now we're seeing the results.

Or are we? Nobody wants to believe it. There's no way to prove that the unborn babies we killed would have grown up to be bad people, or that crime rates have anything to do with abortion. I know my first reaction to this idea was repugnance and rejection.

Except ... 1973 wasn't the beginning of legal abortions in the United States. There were states that legalized abortion several years earlier.

And guess what? In those states, the crime rate began to fall exactly that number of years earlier. The fall in crime rates marches in lockstep with legalized abortion fifteen to twenty years before.

Maybe the growing awareness of this fact is part of the reason why even though most Americans find abortion itself to be a morally appalling act and wish it were rare instead of common, we are also reluctant to give up the relative peace and safety that killing all those babies has brought to us.

That's another causal assertion, and one far less likely to be true. Abortion as class warfare is not something that any political group I know of is likely to openly approve of. So we have to ignore or deny the evidence.

Well, there's a book -- and a mini-movement -- that is trying to cut through all the fog and insist that we face facts in all sorts of areas of American life. It's called "Freakonomics," and it gets its name from the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (science writer).

This book should be required reading before anybody is allowed to vote.

[Reverend Joe]

No.

Unless you consider abortion to be a crime in and of itself, in which case contraception, beating off and nocturnal emissions are all crimes as well.

[IrishArmenian]

No. No. No. No. What could possibly makes somone think this. I might as well ask how large the link between mince-meat pies and terrorism. Nothing.

[Keba]

Most of you seem to be confusing correlation and causality ... one of my teachers usually said, when referring to correlation, that there is a correlation between the number of ice-creams sold and the number or rapes commited, but does that mean that the two are connected?

Generally speaking, abortion is a form of eugenics, a mild one and not nearly as extreme as other proposed (and attempted) forms, but it is eugenics nevertheless, however, so is birth control and all other things connected to preventing conception. Think of it as selection pressure, if you will.

I've already pointed out in another thread my opinions on the banning abortion thing, to put it short, it lowers the number of children their parents' wouldn't love and that wouldn't end up on a street. Thus, in a way, yes, it does reduce crime. I doubt it is the cause of the lowering crime rates, but a major factor in it, certainly. Remember, there are fewer people being born, thus, fewer people with the capacity for crime.

[Samurai Waki]

No. No. No. No. What could possibly makes somone think this. I might as well ask how large the link between mince-meat pies and terrorism. Nothing.

Oh. I think you can terrorise people after eating a minced meat pie

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Zorba, that's a completely flawed analogy.

So are we agreed that getting rid of the unwanted is a noble endeavor? Let's start with the elderly and mentally handicapped next, right? Some guy about 60 years ago tried it, and we still have the plans!

[Patriarch of Constantinople]

No.

Unless you consider abortion to be a crime in and of itself, in which case contraception, beating off and nocturnal emissions are all crimes as well.

Well its considered murder by a few people. Think about it, youre killing a human being before it got to see the outside world.

[Xiahou]

I thought this was an interest subject to talk about

What is the effect of abortion on crime ?

"Little" or "none" would be my guess.

As to 'Freakonomics':

The Boston Fed's Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the programming of Mr. Levitt's original research. He argues the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared.

link
Now, without wading into all the statistical gobbledygook, the single fact that they used total arrests rather than a per-capita number is quite eye-opening.

[mercian billman]

Zorba, that's a completely flawed analogy.

So are we agreed that getting rid of the unwanted is a noble endeavor? Let's start with the elderly and mentally handicapped next, right? Some guy about 60 years ago tried it, and we still have the plans!

It's not a good thing, but if woman who are more likely to produce criminals, due to the enviroment their children are raised in, decide to have abortions, it makes sense that the crime rate will go down. Another way for the crime rate to have gone down, would be if these women chose to place their children into adoption, which didn't happen. When Roe vs Wade was inacted in 1973 approx. 8% of premarital births were placed into adoption, by 1995 it was 2%. From these statistics we could theorize that not only did Roe vs Wade, lead to a decrease in crime, it also led to a decrease in adoption.

[Lemur]

Now, without wading into all the statistical gobbledygook, the single fact that they used total arrests rather than a per-capita number is quite eye-opening.

Summation of the authors' response:

Response to Foote and Goetz: Donohue and Levitt admit the programming error made in the original version of the paper and then go on to address the two points that Foote and Goetz make (see here for the reply). Donohue and Levitt contend that even though Foote and Goetz analysis was doing what Donohue and Levitt claim that they were originally doing it produces heavy attenuation bias (the reason they find no statistical relationship between abortion and crime). To remedy this, Donohue and Levitt use the improved abortion measures (that Lott and Whitley originally used) and they make other changes that they now argue are necessary, and they claim that with these new changes the results are smaller, but still statistically significant.

PDF of the full paper in response.

Hard to see how we can get very far into it without getting into statistical gobbledygook. Also not surprising that there's (gasp) an academic who disagrees with economic theories put forward in a bestselling book. That wouldn't be, I don't know, sort of a no-brainer for someone in a field that doesn't get much publicity?

[edit]

The upshot of their response seems to be, "Okay, we applied your corrections, and the numbers still show the same trends."

[Reverend Joe]

Zorba, that's a completely flawed analogy.

How? Seriously, what if the sperm you eliminate earlier in the day would have impregnated a woman later that night? And why is stopping an egg from being fertilized not exactly like removing that same egg alter on?

You know, that is exactly how the anti-abortion lobby began in the first place. Accept all children GOD sends you. As if GOD is concerned with each and every woman's uterus.

[Xiahou]

How? Seriously, what if the sperm you eliminate earlier in the day would have impregnated a woman later that night? And why is stopping an egg from being fertilized not exactly like removing that same egg alter on?

I hesitate to answer here, but I assume your question is sincere.... The difference between a fertilizaed egg and a lone sperm or unfertilized egg is obvious. Alone, they are indeed just another cell in your body, however, once the egg is fertilized it has it's own DNA which is completely distinct from either the mother or father and it will never exist again. At that point it has everything it needs to develop into an adult- hair color, eye color, height, and many other attributes are already decided.

Hard to see how we can get very far into it without getting into statistical gobbledygook.

Like I said, if they only used total arrests and not arrests per 100,000 or whatever it's easy for me to see how it could skew data based on population growth. No gobbledygook needed for that. The link was mainly to illustrate that their correlation is not a given and that there are many statisticians who claim to find fault with it.

For my part, even if there is correlation I dont really care. As others have pointed out, correlation is not causation. Therefore, the Freakonomics assertion is without basis imo.

[rory_20_uk]

The egg can theoreticll make it to a human.

If it implants. Many fail to do so.
Those that do have on average a 1 in 3 chance of aborting. Sometimes this happens so early the woman never knows she was pregnant.

If you analyse a given amount of data eventually you'll get a grouping that you want.

If a computer fires dots completely randomly at a background there will be grouping, and one can then blow these up into "hotspots" of whatever it happens to be.

[Claudius the God]

I remember reading about how many thousands of Irish girls and women travel from Ireland to the U.K. where they can get a legal abortion...

[Samurai Waki]

Anyone can make a statistic about anything totally unrelated to each other.

Did you know that the Increase of Global Disasters has Risen while the number of Pirates on earth have fallen? Just look at this handy graph!

[Papewaio]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

[Ja'chyra]

Obviously there is a link, the more abortions there are the less single parents there will be and we all know it is the children from single parent families that cause all the crime.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Obviously there is a link, the more abortions there are the less single parents there will be and we all know it is the children from single parent families that cause all the crime.

Yet demographics tell us that, in most Western countries, the number of unwed mothers has increased -- both as a raw number and as a percentage -- during the time frames when abortion has been legal and more or less generally available. This says to me that some other change is driving both and that one cannot "cure" the other.

I agree that single parent househoulds and crime frequency correlate, but nobody has demonstrated a causal link statistically yet (at least I haven't seen it). Not saying it isn't there, but as noted above, demonstrating a causal link is much more difficult then suggesting the nature of that link.

Don't assume causality when both phenomena may be symptoms of some larger cause. Remember, in virtually all instances, an increase in the number of churches in a given community is very highly correlated with an increase in the number of prostitutes.

[Reenk Roink]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

If you murder everyone there would be no crime...

[Navaros]

Of course there is a link between "abortion" and crime.

Murdering a baby - as "abortion" does - is a crime, even if it is called "abortion" to try and gloss over that act of murder.

[yesdachi]

Well there is far more research done on this subject than I thought there would be. In my boiled down view of the subject (after reading more info than I thought I would) I would have to say that there is a connection and that it makes sense that less children born into bad or un-wanting families would cause a drop in children that were raised poorly and would be more likely to commit crimes.

This is a bit of a tangent but, I honestly think many pro-life activists do not understand the lasting effects of their actions. Encouraging a pregnant woman to have a baby without understanding the situation that baby will be born into is irresponsible and unless they are going to be there to help raise the baby too they shouldn’t try and sway a woman’s decision. Encouraging someone to have their baby because they think abortion is murder is noble but that same person should take some of the responsibility for the baby they, thru their convincing activism, just saved from death and are now just as big a part of the baby’s existence as the father (father gave mom the seed and the activist convinced mom to grow it). But where does that activist go to after the baby is born? On to the next pregnant woman while the new mom is dealing with all the problems she knew she would (and probably more) without the support and encouragement from their activist that was so critical during pregnancy. Pro-life activists are worse than dead-beat dads if they are not helping raise the children they stopped from being aborted. At least the court can go after the dead-beat dad for child support, a pro-life activist can run around making unwanted babies without any consequence or taking any responsibility.

[GoreBag]

If you abort everyone there would be no crime.

Ah, Calculus serves me well. The more aborted, the fewer crimes we have, just so long as we don't push it to the limit.