Sharon Krum
A Second Look
Can a poor, black woman who had an abortion in Kentucky in 1974 take any credit for the spectacularly low crime rates being chalked up in the United States today?
According to a controversial new study into the impact of legalised abortion on American crime, this hypothetical woman can stand up and take a bow. Her termination, and those performed on thousands like her since the landmark US Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade in 1973 legalised abortion, has eliminated many of the potential criminals of the 1990s.
So say researchers Steve Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor, in a paper entitled Legalised Abortion and Crime. Though unpublished, their research has already become the subject of much debate among criminologists and both pro-choice and pro-life advocates.
It argues that when abortion was unavailable in the US, the unwanted children of adolescent, poor and minority women often moved into a life of crime as adults.
Legalised abortion enabled women to avoid bringing into the world “children who will lead really tough lives. They’re the ones who are most likely to have been unloved by their mothers, to have faced intense poverty.”
In the pair’s study, they cite research from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia that revealed children born to mothers who could not get an abortion were predisposed to a life of crime. These mothers were less likely to nurture, hold and breastfeed their babies, leading those children to act out against society as they got older.
“This literature provides strong evidence that unwanted children are likely to be disproportionately involved in criminal activity,” Donohue and Levitt write.
Examining crime rates in the US, they found that states which had high abortion rates after 1973 experienced huge drops in crime in the 1990s, even when other factors such as income and race were taken into account.
Susan Tew, a representative of the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organisation that researches abortion trends, agrees there is no question that legalised abortion in the US changed the landscape for low-income and minority women.
To suggest it had added benefits to society as a method of crime reduction, however, was missing the mark.
“For impoverished women who cannot get access to abortion, there are consequences for those children and society further down the track. We know this. But to advocate that abortion is an answer to crime is warped.”
Dr Leslie Wolfe, director of the Centre for Women’s Policy Studies in Washington DC, goes further, arguing: “This is eugenics disguised as scholarship.”
While the paper’s authors insist their research was an attempt to determine what causes reduced crime, not to endorse abortion, Wolfe disagrees.
“This is the worst kind of simplification of both the crime rate and abortion. On the basis of flimsy data, this study is recommending that abortion can be used to control crime. This flies in the face of everything we believe about reproductive choice.
“Since the Seventies, there has actually been an increase in certain kinds of crime, in spite of increased abortions. Look at the mass murders of today. They are not being committed by children of low-income families of colour, but by privileged white boys.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, since abortion was legalised in 1973, more than 34-million abortions have been performed in the US, 1,4-million of them in 1996, the last year for which statistics are available. Tew says the institute’s statistics found women under 25, separated, never married, poor or members of a minority group are twice as likely as other women to have an abortion.
And while white women in the US obtain 60% of all abortions, black women are three times as likely as white women to have an abortion and Hispanic women are twice as likely.
Financially, abortion is relatively cheap in the US compared with other health services and 16 states provide government funding for it.
Tew says a first trimester abortion in the US can cost from $175 to $400. “It is difficult for many poor women to raise funds for an abortion,” she points out, “but compared with other health services, it can be done.”
Wolfe fears some politicians and sociologists will seize on this latest paper to promote their own political agendas.
“I don’t think this research was designed to increase knowledge but to garner support for a certain agenda. It seems they want to encourage certain groups of women to have abortions.
“It’s a frightening thing to turn the movement for reproductive rights into a statement of social policy.”