Abortion and crime - A missing link

According to a recent New York Times headline, ("Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts," May 26, 2011), we criminologists are clueless when it comes to explaining the drop in serious crime. To the contrary, a range of plausible explanations have been advanced to account for the downturn in lawlessness that this nation has enjoyed since the early 1990s. Over the long-term, the welcomed trend can be linked to several factors:

• the calmer aftermath of the late-1980s crack epidemic that had caused city crime levels to spike until the drug market shifted;

• improved police strategies that rely heavily on innovative technology and sophisticated crime analysis tools;

• expanded use of incarceration along with longer sentences that have kept more criminals off the streets; and

• the graying of America whereby the fastest growing segment of the population are the aging "baby-boomers" who are now over 50 years old and hardly babies anymore.

Reading beyond the headline of the Times story, however, what "baffled" me and other criminologists was the short-term plunge in crime from the first half of 2009 to the first half of 2010, especially the 6.2% drop in violent crime that included a 7.1% dip in murder. There is nothing even close to definitive that can account for such a large reduction over such a limited time period (other than the natural fluctuations inherent of short-term trends).

In the days since the Times article appeared, I have been treated to a large volume of e-mails from folks offering various suggestions concerning the cause—everything from the impact of a meeting some five years ago of a large group of transcendental meditators who used their special skills to bring about peace, to an increased community cohesion as the recession prevented countless Americans from moving residences.

More than a few of the e-mailers, however, were riders on the abortion-crime link bandwagon. A spirited debate among economists was ignited a decade ago when John Donohue of Yale and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago concluded that legalized abortion had produced a drop in crime. These prominent scholars argued that following the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, thousands of unwanted fetuses were aborted instead of being born into less-than-ideal environments, thereby producing two decades later a reduction in the pool of at-risk, violence-prone individuals.