Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (17 page)

Less serious crimes, receiving less police attention, are not as likely to be solved and are also less likely to be reported. During 2005, victims reported only about 20 percent of larcenies to police, compared to an estimated 63 percent of rapes and 68 percent of aggravated assaults. Since more than half of all larcenies involve items worth less than $100, this should come as no surprise.
¹⁰
Many people are deterred from reporting petty crimes by the inconvenience of dealing with the police and the slim chance of recovering the items.

So why is the rising rate of crime reporting important? Recall the example of the basketball referees: increasing the number of officials discouraged fouls, but it also made any given foul more likely to be noticed. The same effect is at play with the crime rate, which fell sharply in the 1990s even while the rate of reporting violent crime noticeably increased.

This trend indicates that anti-crime efforts in the 1990s were even more effective than is commonly believed. After accounting for the rise in crime reporting, we find that violent crime during the 1990s fell by about 10 percent more than the FBI’s statistics show. Property crimes fell by about 30 percent more. Furthermore, the rate of reporting of violent crimes surged by 46 percent from 1999 to 2002. This implies that official data on recent violent crime rates—which show crime rates leveling off after the drop of the 1990s—are particularly misleading. In reality, fewer crimes are occurring, but a higher percentage of them are being reported.
¹¹

So what explains the fantastic plunge in crime rates during the 1990s? A lot of the individual pieces to this puzzle have been identified.
Analysts have advanced a variety of plausible explanations, but it is not always clear how these fit together. Some stress law enforcement aspects such as increased arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, “broken windows” police strategies, and the death penalty. Others emphasize different factors, including right-to-carry laws for concealed handguns, a strong economy, the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, or affirmative action polices within police departments. It is even argued that legalized abortion has helped to stem crime. Many of these explanations may simultaneously be true, but there is lively debate about which factors are more important than others, and whether some policies actually did more harm than good.

So how do we evaluate the competing explanations? Before we identify the successful policies that reduced crime, let’s look at a few factors that had the opposite result.

Of all the explanations for the drop in crime rates during the 1990s, perhaps the most controversial is its attribution to
Roe v. Wade
, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to mandate legalized abortion. The large number of women who began having abortions shortly after the
Roe v. Wade
decision were most likely unmarried, in their teens, or poor, the argument goes, and their children would have been “unwanted.” This indicates a high probability that these children, if born, would have grown up to be criminals. But because they were aborted, these children, who would have been teenagers entering their “criminal prime” in the early 1990s, were not around to commit the crimes expected of them. According to
Freakonomics
, abortion thereby became “one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history.”
¹⁴
An attention-grabbing theory, to be sure. But, as we shall see, a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to a contrary conclusion—that abortion, in fact,
increases
crime.

Even before
Roe v. Wade
, supporters of abortion rights decried the crime and other social problems caused by “unwanted” children. Daniel Callahan summarized the argument in his 1970 book,
Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality
: “To withhold the possibility of a safe and socially acceptable abortion for unmarried women is to start the chain of illegitimacy and despair that will continue to keep poverty, crime, and poor mental health high on the list of pressing social problems.”
¹⁵

The argument was reiterated in 1972 by the Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future. Established by Richard Nixon, the Commission cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion “turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance.”
¹⁶

The Commission appears to have been greatly influenced by a study published in 1966 by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe.
¹⁷
The two studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the only hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these “unwanted” children to another group—the next children born
after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The study found that the unwanted children were much more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes. They were also more likely to become delinquents and have trouble in school. Unfortunately, the authors never investigated whether the children’s unwantedness
caused
these problems, or were simply
correlated
with them. Perhaps a family’s poverty was the real cause of these dysfunctions, and women who sought abortions were more likely to be poor.

Nevertheless, the argument became axiomatic among supporters of legalized abortion. During the 1960s and 1970s, before
Roe v. Wade
, abortion rights advocates attributed all sorts of social ills, including crime and mental illness, to unwanted children.
¹⁸
Furthermore, they found that “unwanted children are more likely to be abandoned, neglected and abused,”
¹⁹
and they tend to be “poorly fed, poorly housed and poorly clothed.”
²⁰
Weeding these poor, crime-prone people out of the population through abortion was therefore presented as a beneficial deed that would make society safer.

More recently, two economists—John Donohue and Steven Levitt—became the first analysts since Forssman and Thuwe to attempt to present systematic evidence that abortion reduces crime.
²¹
They argued that the drop in crime rates during the 1990s was primarily due to the increase in the availability of legal abortion in 1970—when abortion was deregulated in five states
²²
—and especially in 1973—when
Roe v. Wade
deregulated abortion in the remaining states. The effect, they claimed, was staggeringly large—the pair attributed up to “one-half of the overall crime reduction” and up to 81 percent of the drop in murder rates from 1991 to 1997 to the rise in abortions in the early-to-mid 1970s.
²³
If accurate, they had surely found the Holy Grail for reducing crime.

The theoretical link between “unwanted” children and crime is simple and powerful. Most people who oppose this thesis argue from a moral perspective instead of trying to rebut the evidence. But whatever
weight people put on moral arguments, the claim that abortion can prevent some murders and save lives causes at least some people to rethink their position. Unfortunately, the original arguments never acknowledged the possible pernicious effects of abortion on crime. And when we look at the data, we find that the argument doesn’t hold up empirically.

Let’s begin by looking at the overall status of abortion in the United States in the early 1970s. This is when Donohue and Levitt find that the “legalization” of abortion laid the foundation for the future drop in crime. It should be noted that, contrary to popular belief, there was not a blanket ban on legal abortion before the early 1970s. While closely regulated, the procedure was legal in various circumstances, such as when the life or health of the mother was at risk. In some states, doctors interpreted this clause quite liberally. As a result, legal abortion was much more widespread before
Roe v. Wade
than is commonly acknowledged. In fact, in 1970-1973, when abortion was “legal” in five states but “banned” in the rest, some of the “banned” states had similar or even higher rates of legal abortion than in the “legal” states. For example, Kansas had 277 abortions per 1,000 live births in 1971, outstripping “legal” states such as Alaska (160), Hawaii (261), and Washington (265). High rates of abortion could be found in other “banned” states and districts, such as Washington, D.C. (703), New Mexico (219), and Oregon (206).
²⁴
Donahue and Levitt, whose main results mistakenly assumed that no legal abortions occurred in any of the “banned” states before 1973, thus began their study with flawed statistics.
²⁵

A central problem with the “abortion reduces crime” thesis is that it conflates and blurs two different arguments. The first contention is that aborted children would have been more likely to cause crime specifically because they’re unwanted—since their parents did not wish to have them, they would likely have grown up in an unloving household, and would have therefore been more prone to crime. A separate,
less savory explanation is that abortion reduces crime by culling out certain demographic groups that commit disproportionate numbers of crime, for example, young African American males. If abortion really reduces crime, then this “eugenics” effect could be highly significant, since African Americans have an abortion rate that has consistently been about three times that of whites and a murder rate about 6.5 times that of whites.
²⁶

While their discussion emphasized the “unwanted child” theory, Donohue and Levitt never separated it from the eugenics approach, which was left without refutation in their work.
²⁷
Indeed, Donahue and Levitt seem to have deliberately avoided the racial implications of their own theory, as their inquiry is one of the few academic studies on crime by economists that doesn’t account for these demographics. Perhaps this was just too explosive to mention; after all, who would dare to state that abortion lowers crime rates by reducing the population of poor African Americans?
²⁸

The relationship between abortion and crime is complex. We must begin by considering the circumstances and expectations under which a woman becomes pregnant. Remember the fundamental principle of economics: if something becomes more costly, people do less of it. If abortion is illegal, the “cost” of sex is relatively high due to the possibility of pregnancy. No method of birth control is 100 percent effective, and without the option to have an abortion as a last-ditch safeguard, having sex carries a risk. When contemplating having pre-marital sex, women know that they might have to bear and raise a child, possibly on their own. Likewise, men know that they might end up having to support a child, and both know that having a baby could create pressures on them to marry even if they don’t want to do so. Consequently, both men and women tend to be more reluctant to engage in casual sex, especially unprotected sex, when abortion is illegal.
²⁹