Freakonomics Claim Abortion Drops Crime Rates Refuted Again

Life News ^ | 6/2/11 | Steven Ertelt

[wagglebee]

Boston Globe writer James Alan Fox has yet another refutation of the claim by economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt in their infamous book Freakonomics that legalizing abortion led to a drop in crime rates.

Fox said readers of the newspaper emailed him recently concerning a New York Times piece on crime rate reductions and they advocated the disproved notion that legalized abortion resulted in a reduction in violent crimes. Fox, a criminologist, has responded and says the theory is full of holes:

Despite persuasive logic regarding a reduction in the number of children born to circumstances that would place them at-risk for growing into criminality, the significance of this effect appears to have been grossly overstated. For example, nearly 60% of the decline in murder since 1990 involved perpetrators ages 25 and older—individuals who would have been born prior to the landmark abortion decision. As shown in the figure below, there were substantial reductions during the 1990s in homicides committed by older age groups, especially those in the 25-34 year-old age range.

The abortion-crime link also cannot account for the transient surge in youth homicide during the late 1980s, if not for which the 1990s would not have witnessed such a sizable decline. The rise and then fall in youth homicide before and then after 1990 has much more to do with fast changing patterns of drug trade, gang activity and illegal gun supply than a sudden shift in abortion policy.

Finally, the abortion-crime hypothesis cannot explain the large drop in murder and other violent crime from the first six months of 2009 to the corresponding months of 2010. In fact, nothing really can.

This is not the first time Fox, of Northeastern University, has refuted the abortion-crime theory. He released a study in December 2008 showing a large rise in homicides by black teens in recent years even though black women have the highest abortion rate. The study found homicides by blacks between the ages of 14 and 17 have jumped 34 percent from 2000 through 2007. The number of crimes for white people in the same age range did not increase.

In the book Freakonomics, Levitt claimed legalizing abortion led to a major drop in murder and other violent crimes in the 1980s and 1990s. He theorized that the babies who were victimized by abortion would have been more likely to commit crimes. But Fox’s study shows violent crime in the black community has gone up in the last decade — not down.

“Yes, it’s not nearly as bad as it was in 1990, but it is worse than it was in 2000,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Yet, if Levitt’s hypothesis is true, crime should have gone down significantly in the black community because of a higher abortion rate.

An August 2007 study conducted by a researcher at the University of Maryland shows that legalized abortion has led to higher rates of crime and increased murder rates. That occurred because a higher percentage of children grew up in single-parent homes during the years following Roe v. Wade.

The findings were published in the April 2007 issue of the academic journal Economic Inquiry and are part of a new book written by researcher John R. Lott. According to Lott, the high court’s decision ultimately resulted in more out-of-wedlock births, a reduction in the number of children adopted and fewer married parents.

Before that, Lott and John Whitley, affiliated with the University of Chicago, wrote a paper in August 2006 challenging the abortion-crime reduction claims.

Meanwhile, in November 2005, Christopher Foote, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and research assistant Christopher Goetz, told the Wall St. Journal the data Levitt used was faulty.

Foote said there was a “missing formula” in Levitt’s original research that allowed him to ignore certain factors that may have contributed to the lowering of crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Foote also argues that Levitt counted the total number of arrests made when he should have used per-capita figures. After Foote adjusted for both factors, the abortion effect simply disappeared, the Journal reported.

“There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term,” Foote and Goetz say in their report.

[metmom]

Criminals are one thing, demoKKKrats are another. What percentage of the people aborted since 1973 would have been lifelong demoKKKrats?? I mean, are there really that many Republicans and conservatives having abortions out there?? Unless you can answer that, there’s an obvious potential problem with wanting to pass draconian laws.

That *draconian* law has been the law of the land in most countries in the world throughout history. It's only recently that Roe v. Wade repealed it and made murder legal although legalizing it does not make it moral.

Abortion is murder, plain and simple. Laws against murder are not *draconian*.

Give us back the laws like this that existed at the time of the writing of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers didn't see any problem with them.

You are clearly on the wrong website.

[DJ MacWoW]

That other five percent of cases involve questions of rape or genetic compromise and the like;

Can you back that up statistically?

As to the genetic crap I know a couple that will be having their NORMAL son baptized this Sunday. The one they were told to abort because he was defective. He ISN'T.

Ninety percent of Down Syndrome pregnancies in the industrialized world end in abortion.

Need another link here.

You rationalize murder. You're a sick pup.

[P-Marlowe]

What percentage of the people aborted since 1973 would have been lifelong demoKKKrats?? I mean, are there really that many Republicans and conservatives having abortions out there??

Wow. Spoken like a true believer in both abortion on demand and Darwinian evolution.

What the hell are you doing on THIS forum?

Shouldn't you be posting at Darwin Central and DU?

[wagglebee]

Here's what I AM saying.... I would advise women against abortions in something like 95% of cases.

So, of the 53 MILLION babies slaughtered since 1973 you think that 2.65 MILLION of them deserved to die?

That other five percent of cases involve questions of rape or genetic compromise and the like;

For starters, abortions of rape victims comprise less than ONE QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT of abortions. Secondly, for what other crimes do you think the child of the criminal should be put to death?

What EXACTLY is genetic compromise? Baldness? Nearsightedness?

all you could hope to accomplish by banning those abortions is the destruction of the Republican party and the conservative movement.

That's the same thing the Whigs said about slavery.

Ninety percent of Down Syndrome pregnancies in the industrialized world end in abortion. When you are being beaten nine to one in the marketplace of ideas or in the application of those ideas, you should not be talking about "having a moral absolute".

You are a twisted troll.

Aside from all of that there actually is a question of the effect of Roe/Wade on crime and, worse, on the national percentage of demoKKKrats. Until somebody makes a study of that one, you have to assume that without Roe/Wade, it might have been twenty years since anybody other than a DemoKKKrat ever won any sort of an election in America.

You sound EXACTLY like every racist eugenicist that has ever lived.

I'm not trying to poop parties or be a devil's advocate here,

Trust me, Satan rejoices in advocates like YOU.

Religion is the study of how the world ought to be; economics is the study of how the world actually is, and the world we live in is a hard one.

Spoken like a true leftist.

[BykrBayb]

How nauseating!

[trisham]

None of what you have said sounds conservative.

[wagglebee]

She sounds like a bloodthirsty leftist if you ask me.

[trisham]

Yes, her arguments sound like propaganda from the left.

[Theophilus]

So many prospective victims have been preemptively murdered. So there you are. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles for lack of wealth builders and consumers and our national security is threatened by an aging population and imploding and broken families.

[wendy1946]

You sound like you’re ready to go to war over this one issue. Funny thing, so are THEY... Another question you need to ask yourself is this: how much control do you think you’re ever going to have over demoKKKrats wanting abortions after CW-II and after the country has been split up over the issue? I still like persuasion and the idea of making it possible for people to marry and start families in their late teens and early twenties better than I like draconian laws.

[wagglebee]

Exactly, people do not realize that economic growth REQUIRES normal population growth, abortion messed all of that up.

[DJ MacWoW]

I still like persuasion and the idea of making it possible for people to marry and start families in their late teens and early twenties better than I like draconian laws.

They made murder legal and you are defending it. And doing so by using situational ethics. That is NOT conservative.

[Theophilus]

Religion is the study of how the world ought to be

James 1:27
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

economics is the study of how the world actually is

1 Timothy 5:8
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Economics is a study of how to provide for your own. Religion is my duty before the Provider of us all, to be an instrument of his Providence.

[P-Marlowe]

That other five percent of cases involve questions of rape or genetic compromise and the like;

You sound like a freaking NAZI! That was the whole idea behind Eugenics; to remove the genetically compromised from the gene pool.

I cannot believe that you are the person who posted the stuff on your forum page. You rail against evolution on your forum page and then you propose man-assisted evolution through eugenics.

Hypocrite is too kind a word for you.

It is time to reassess whether or not you belong on this forum. Either that or it is time to reassess your philosophy.

I hope you enjoyed your stay here at Free Republic. I suspect your days here are numbered.

[wagglebee]

You sound like you’re ready to go to war over this one issue.

53 MILLION INNOCENT AMERICANS have been murdered since 1973. Another is murdered EVERY 24 SECONDS.

What should we be ready to fight for if not innocent life?

Another question you need to ask yourself is this: how much control do you think you’re ever going to have over demoKKKrats wanting abortions after CW-II and after the country has been split up over the issue?

You sound EXACTLY like those who wanted to keep compromising on slavery until our Republic exploded.

Here is what you say on your FR homepage:

The most major areas of discussion on FR which I contribute to are questions of origins science, prehistory, evolution and the like. The theory of evolution is junk science and, as junk science goes, a spectacularly dangerous and harmful variety of such with two world wars, the various eugenics movements, out of control arms races and something like 300,000,000 dead bodies lying around to its credit.

Why are you now ADVOCATING the same Darwinism you claim to oppose?

[BykrBayb]

Why are you now ADVOCATING the same Darwinism you claim to oppose?

Sometimes I wonder if a FReeper dies, and their liberal relatives take over their account. Only a liberal would desecrate their family member's memory like that.

[trisham]

The home page doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s the posting history that counts.

[wagglebee]

The home page doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s the posting history that counts.

Exactly, trolls will often repeat what they've seen somewhere else. This troll probably doesn't even know that what she is advocating is textbook eugenics.

[BykrBayb]

I always find the “I’m pro-life, but...” approach entertaining.

[wagglebee]

This one is more of the "I'm personally opposed to eugenics, but think certain people should practice it" variety.