THE IMPACT OF LEGALIZED ABORTION ON CRIME [*].

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier 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 crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

I. INTRODUCTION

Since 1991, the United States has experienced the sharpest drop in murder rates since the end of Prohibition in 1933. Homicide rates have fallen more than 40 percent. Violent crime and property crime have each declined more than 30 percent. Hundreds of articles discussing this change have appeared in the academic literature and popular press. [1] They have offered an array of explanations: the increasing use of incarceration, growth in the number of police, improved policing strategies such as those adopted in New York, declines in the crack cocaine trade, the strong economy, and increased expenditures on victim precautions such as security guards and alarms.

None of these factors, however, can provide an entirely satisfactory explanation for the large, widespread, and persistent drop in crime in the 1990s. Some of these trends, such as the increasing scale of imprisonment, the rise in police, and expenditures on victim precaution, have been ongoing for over two decades, and thus cannot plausibly explain the recent abrupt improvement in crime. Moreover, the widespread nature of the crime drop argues against explanations such as improved policing techniques since many cities that have not improved their police forces (e.g., Los Angeles) have nonetheless seen enormous crime declines. A similar argument holds for crack cocaine. Many areas of the country that have never had a pronounced crack trade (for instance, suburban and rural areas) have nonetheless experienced substantial decreases in crime. Finally, although a strong economy is superficially consistent with the drop in crime since 1991, previous research has established only a weak link between economic perfo rmance and violent crime [Freeman 1995] and in one case even suggested that murder rates might vary procyclically [Ruhm 2000].

While acknowledging that all of these factors may have also served to dampen crime, we consider a novel explanation for the sudden crime drop of the 1990s: the decision to legalize abortion over a quarter century ago. [2] The Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion nationwide potentially fits the criteria for explaining a large, abrupt, and continuing decrease in crime. The sheer magnitude of the number of abortions performed satisfies the first criterion that any shock underlying the recent drop in crime must be substantial. Seven years after Roe v. Wade, over 1.6 million abortions were being performed annually--almost one abortion for every two live births. Moreover, the legalization of abortion in five states in 1970, and then for the nation as a whole in 1973, were abrupt legal developments that might plausibly have a similarly abrupt influence 15-20 years later when the cohorts born in the wake of liberalized abortion would start reaching their high-crime years. Finally, any inf luence of a change in abortion would impact crime cumulatively as successive affected cohorts entered into their high-crime late adolescent years, providing a reason why crime has continued to fall year after year.

Legalized abortion may lead to reduced crime either through reductions in cohort sizes or through lower per capita offending rates for affected cohorts. The smaller cohort that results from abortion legalization means that when that cohort reaches the late teens and twenties, there will be fewer young males in their highest-crime years, and thus less crime. More interesting and important is the possibility that children born after abortion legalization may on average have lower subsequent rates of criminality for either of two reasons. First, women who have abortions are those most at risk to give birth to children who would engage in criminal activity. Teenagers, unmarried women, and the economically disadvantaged are all substantially more likely to seek abortions [Levine et al. 1996]. Recent studies have found children born to these mothers to be at higher risk for committing crime in adolescence [Comanor and Phillips 1999]. Gruber, Levine, and Staiger [1999], in the paper most similar to ours, document t hat the early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difficult 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 childbearing. A given woman's ability to provide a nurturing environment to a child can fluctuate over time depending on the woman's age, education, and income, as well as the presence of a father in the child's life, whether the pregnancy is wanted, and any drug or alcohol abuse both in utero and after the birth. Consequently, legalized abortion provides a woman the opportunity to delay childbearing if the current conditions are suboptimal. Even if lifetime fertility remains constant for all women, children are born into better environments, and future criminality is likely to be reduced.

A number of anecdotal empirical facts support the existence and magnitude of the crime-reducing impact of abortion. First, we see a broad consistency with the timing of legalization of abortion and the subsequent drop in crime. For example, the peak ages for violent crime are roughly 18-24, and crime starts turning down around 1992, roughly the time at which the first cohort born following Roe v. Wade would hit its criminal prime. Second, as we later demonstrate, the five states that legalized abortion in 1970 saw drops in crime before the other 45 states and the District of Columbia, which did not allow abortions until the Supreme Court decision in 1973.