Like Murders? Keep Abortion Legal

The stats work was done by John Lott, mostly to correct the egregious stupidity of "Freakonomics." But the conclusions are interesting regardless.

To understand why abortion might not cut crime, one should first consider how dramatically it changed sexual relationships. Once abortion became widely available, people engaged in much more premarital sex, and also took less care in using contraceptives...All of these outcomes — more out-of-wedlock births, fewer adoptions than expected, and less pressure on men “to do the right thing” — led to a sharp increase in single-parent families

...No matter how much they want their children, single parents tend to devote less attention to them than married couples do. Single parents are less likely than married parents to read to their children or take them on excursions, and more likely to feel angry at their children or to feel that they are burdensome. Children raised out of wedlock have more social and developmental problems than children of married couples by almost any measure — from grades to school expulsion to disease. Unsurprisingly, children from unmarried families are also more likely to become criminals [see any of the Rockford Institute's publications during the 1980's, e.g. for verification.]

Unfortunately for those who argue that abortion reduces crime, Donahue and Levitt’s [Freakonomics] research suffered from methodological flaws. As The Economist noted, “Donohue and Levitt did not run the test that they thought they had.” Work by two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, found that, when the test was run correctly, it indicated that abortion actually increases violent crime.

The “abortion decreases crime” theory runs into even more problems when the population is analyzed by age group...Deregulating abortion would then [have] reduce[d] criminality first among age groups born after the abortion laws changed, when the “unwanted,” crime-prone elements began to be weeded out. Yet when we look at the declining murder rate during the 1990s, we find that this is not the case at all. Instead, murder rates began falling first among an older generation — those over 26 — born before Roe. It was only later that criminality among those born after Roe began to decline

Legalizing abortion increased crime. Those born in the four years after Roe were much more likely to commit murder than those born in the four years prior. This was especially true when they were in their “criminal prime,”...

Even if abortion did lower crime by culling out “unwanted” children (a conclusion derived from flawed statistics), this effect would be greatly outweighed by the rise in crime associated with the greater incidence of single-parent families that also follows from abortion liberalization. In short, more abortions have brought more crime

(Quoted by The Papist from a Fox News essay.)

Maybe Planned Parenthood should donate its $300MM/year in profits to the States for the purpose of building more prisons. After all, they are the proximate cause...