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released late last week from the National Crime Victimization Survey
showing falling rates of crime in the U.S. begs the obvious question,
"Why?" The timing of the new crime numbers was opportune for Steven
Levitt and John Donahue, who, after two years of leaks and drafts
and heaps of press buzz, had just published their notorious abortion-crime
study in the May edition of the Harvard Quarterly Journal of
Economics. In it, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt
and Stanford University Law School professor John Donohue III argue
that the decrease in crime during the 1990s can be attributed to
abortion, which has been legal since 1974.
Ever since the paper's early media leaks last year, pro-lifers have
excoriated its logic and assumptions. But now that the paper finally
has been published (by Harvard, no less!), its findings will soon
find a place in the annals of junk science. The paper's conclusions
are simply false — and it's not just pro-life activists who
are saying so. David Murray, a statistician at the Statistical Assessment
Service, recently told Foxnews.com that Levitt and Donahue "didn't
ask the right question and as soon as you ask the right question
the effect they think they're seeing disappears and the picture
becomes much more obscure, much more cloudy." Young males between
17 and 25 commit the majority of crimes. According to Murray, if
abortion did reduce crime, rates would have first dropped among
young people. They haven't.
Murray's contention finds strength in a new study from researchers
John R. Lott Jr. of Yale and John Whitley of the University of Adelaide
(Australia). "There are many factors that reduce murder rates, but
the legalization of abortion is not one of them," Lott and Whitley
conclude in "Abortion
and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births." They
find that legal abortion might have actually increased crime
rates. Another study deflating the abortion-crime correlation, by
Baruch economist Ted Joyce, argues that the drop in crime has been
due to a decline in the popularity of crack cocaine. A professor
of criminal justice at Northeastern University, James Alan Fox,
has dubbed the Donohue-Levitt conclusions "voodoo econometrics";
they are "going so far out on a limb that the limb has cracked off
underneath them," said Fox.
Nonetheless, Levitt (who has admitted to having "moral qualms" over
abortion) and Donahue (who endorses the Dutch approach on abortion)
sweep aside most of the criticism of their findings with breezy
indifference. Says Levitt: "The Joyce one actually does some reasonable
things and supports our findings for the most part, but he doesn't
seem to understand that. The Lott one is just garbage." He adds,
"I am still waiting to hear a reasonable criticism of our findings."
Despite its eugenic undertones, the Levitt-Donahue research has
been embraced by some in the abortion industry. In a guest Op-Ed
last month in the Canadian National Post titled "It's
Better for Us That They Died," leading abortionist Henry Morgentaler
praises the Levitt-Donahue study, declaring moral vindication, and
arguing that this is what he had been saying for decades. (If women
only exercised their choice, we'd have fewer criminals in our midst!)
In the wake of the furor kicked up by this study, however, the blindingly
obvious response, is, of course: "Who cares?" Even if the Levitt-Donahue
findings were true, there shouldn't be any moral debate here. No
matter what some Ivy League econometric model might say, all victims
of choice are equally innocent, equally entitled to life and love
and nurturing. No amount of social-science research will change
that.
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