Legalized abortion and crime effect

The effect of legalized abortion on crime (also the Donohue–Levitt hypothesis) proposes that legal abortion reduces crime. In 1972, the Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future published research suggesting such a relationship, citing in part works dating to 1966. In 2001, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University argued, citing their research and earlier studies, that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot support them are likelier to become criminals, and that there is an inverse correlation between the availability of abortion and subsequent crime. Critics have argued that Donohue and Levitt's methodologies are flawed.

The 1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future is one of the better known early versions of this claim, although it was not the first. The Commission cited research stating 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." A 1966 study by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe was cited by the Rockefeller Commission and is probably the first serious empirical research on this topic. They studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these unwanted children to another group – the next child born after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The unwanted children were more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes and were more likely to become delinquents and engaged in crime. Supreme Court Justice Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade also referenced the social and private problems "of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it."

Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University revived discussion of this claim with their 2001 paper "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime". Donohue and Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization 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.

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