Data re-evaluation shows abortion associated with increased murder rate Abortion Link to Crime Decrease Debunked.

The May 2001 issue of Harvard University's Quarterly Journal of Economics featured the final version of a controversial paper claiming that legal abortion accounted for as much as half of the reduction in crime during the 1990s.

The paper argued that when fewer kids are born into the sort of social and economic conditions that supposedly "breed" criminals, fewer crimes are committed when these kids come of age.

Now, however, a Yale law professor and an Australian economist have reexamined the data and found several major flaws in the original analysis. Among other problems, the study was thrown off because it did not account for all abortions performed and because it did not adequately consider criminals by age group.

Crime did fall in the 1990s, but the late `80s and early `90s saw a dramatic increase in homicide rates among the young. Ironically - - given the very favorable treatment the original study received in the media - - these researchers say, if anything, abortion is associated with more, not less crime, and with a higher murder rate in particular.

The Donohue-Levitt Thesis: Abortion Decreases Crime

In their paper, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," Stanford University law professor John J. Donohue III and University of Chicago economics professor Steven J. Levitt give what appears to be solid statistical backing to what has long been implicit in arguments the pro-abortion movement and its sympathizers among the cultural elite: abortion helps rid society of "those persons" who might later cause it problems.

Donohue and Levitt claim they stumbled on this thesis by trying to look for factors that would explain the large drop in crime seen in the United States in the 1990s. They chose to look at abortion. "I was just stunned at the magnitude of the abortions relative to births," Donohue told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune (8/8/1999). "It's such a huge number that it has to have had some big impact somewhere."