Did Freakonomics refer directly to the black population and abortion correlating with lower crime rates?
I read it but don’t remember the specifics of that analysis.
I’m not certain that Steven Levitt has ever directly said that black crime is reduced because of abortion, but he has said that crime was reduced in the 1990s because of abortion.
The reality is that crime was reduced in the 90s because so many states abolished parole (which is also why the prison population rose).
Not directly. Freakanomics noted that the women most likely to have an abortion are unmarried, poor and uneducated. Mothers with that background are also the most likely to have children who later end up as criminals. The racial component is correlation, not causation- a high percentage of black mothers fall into the unmarried, poor and uneducated category. If you control for these factors, you find that middle-class, educated, married black women don't have many more abortions, per capita, then their non-black counterparts.