The following blog is partial taken from the book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. There argument will be placed in part 1 and mine will follow in part 2. I will not cite any sources in part 1 b/c i am telling you now that it is from Freakonomics, see their cites if you have questions.
Part 1
In Freakonomics Levitt tackles many social issues with a creative and interesting technique. He uses logic and his own, vast common sense. One of the topics relates to how abortions solved crime in the early-mid 1990's; this is what I will be focusing on. His abortion "case" was actually written in a paper earlier in his career and that is where this quote comes from...
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.
Now if you would like the actual cited work of where they supposedly got this information, read the book, there are 20 pages of cited work and i'm not going to write them all down. But I can tell you this much, they are right on two counts for sure. One states that legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade experienced a crime reduction PRIOR to the rest of the nation. And the states that had the highest rates of abortion also had the least amount of crime. His argument is that the majority of people getting abortions are doing it because they can not support a family. Countless times on this site people say that some people should not be parents and I agree, moreso, so does Levitt. He says that without abortion those women bring in a child they can not support and therefore there is a higher probability that child will turn to crime. Well history shows that he was right in this assumption. Once abortion was legalized those women were offered the choice of not having children(now i'm referring to the ones who believed they could not adequately raise a child) and therefore the probability of said children turning to crime became zero. Furthermore after escalating crime for 27 years(1966-1993) crime dropped all across America. And it kept dropping, baffling sociologist and economist as it passed them by. For years officials tried to come up with reasons that crime would suddenly drop across the nation but none are as simple and eloquent as Levitts. More abortions less crime.
Part 2
Now for the second year in a row since that drop in the 90's crime is back on the rise, as will soon be released in the FBI's report. For this article see http://www.wsbtv.com/news/13415314/detail.html?rss=atl&psp=nationalnews. So crime is back on the rise and mainly in a couple of areas, youth violence, gangs and gun crime, so says the report. Now the FBI say that it is because of the nation-wide increase in anti-terror units that they are lacking on man-power and resources to combat "regular crime." Believe what you want but I doubt this is the main reason.
Ok so I read Freakonomics awhile ago and then I just read this article today and what is the first thing I think to blame of, you guessed it, abortions. A quick Google search leads you to a couple of websites that have the annual number of abortions per year. According to two, seperate sources abortion has been constantly FALLING since 1990 when it peaked at 1.4m a year.(See bottom) Now the report said that youth/gang violence is one of the major reasons for the escalating crime rate. So if you take into account that kids born in 1990 would be 17 this year, that is practically screaming that Levitt was on to something. Now the average ENTRANCE age into gangs is 14-16 yet this age is always changing because as more gang members, past and current, are polled, new information changes the data. But lets agree that average entrance into gangs starts around 15. Now as previously stated, abortion rates dropped from 1990 till 2004(numbers are all 3 years behind) putting all children under the age of 17 in this "new, less abortion age." Someone smarter can think of a better name for it than that. I agree with Levitt about the 1990's crime drop because history supports his claims. In addition I would also like to propose the idea that this new wave of crime is only being resupplied year after year by the dropping number of abortions.
What are your thoughts? Questions, comments, and please don't yell at me. :)
Gangs- http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/pubs/96natyouthgangsrvy/surv_6a.html
AGI and CDC polls- http://www.abortiontv.com/Misc/AbortionStatistics.htm
Have a nice day
T
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This is very interesting, and convincing enough for me...
/jkh