Statistician Says Abortion-Crime Study is Erroneous

New york, NY -- America's dramatic drop in crime during the 1990s has been attributed to everything from the strong economy and tougher laws to the massive increase in the number of prisons. But none of the reasons scholars have offered to explain the nation's safer climate are as controversial as that proposed by Stanford Law Professor John Donahue.

In research to be published in this month's Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics, Donahue and a co-researcher claim legalized abortion may account for as much as half of the recent crime reduction.

According to the study, the crime rate in America dropped 18 years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, reducing the number of mothers who gave birth to unwanted children, and thus reducing the number of people alive today who would be in the peak age group and demographic for committing crimes.

Donohue said his study is not pushing a pro-abortion agenda, nor is he recommending abortion as a crime deterrent tool. Instead, he said his study points out the importance of making sure children are born into loving and nurturing environments and preventing unwanted pregnancies.

The study has elicited strong opposition from pro-life advocates, but even some researchers neutral on the issue of abortion say the study doesn't hold up under tough scrutiny.

Statistician David Murray of the Statistical Assessment Service said the drop in crime rate correlates with a number of different social and cultural developments during the same time period -- everything from the advent of the Internet to the demise of disco music. The latter no more explain the drop in crime than legalized abortion does, he said.

"They 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," Murray said.

Murray said young males between the ages of 17 and 25 do commit the majority of crimes. If abortion did reduce crime, crime rates would have dropped first among young people. They haven't. The number of crimes committed by older people dropped first.

"Your trying to identify, retroactively looking backwards, (if) these people (would) have been likely criminals because they fall in social categories that are also likely to be aborted," said Murray, who said the study amounted to racial profiling.

He said that while the rate of homicide committed by young men has dropped, the rate of aggravated assaults among the young has increased. And the rate of homicides committed by young females -- which should have been equally affected by abortion as males -- has not dropped.

"They didn't ask the right question, they looked at all crimes aggregated together and they looked at all age groups within a certain frame as to whether they have committed crimes," Murray said.

Maryanne Hackett, a spokesperson for Illinois Right to Life, said the 1.5 million abortions performed in the U.S. every year span the population spectrum.

"You're not just losing a certain group that might be criminals," Hacket said. "You're losing people that contribute and are valuable to society," she said.

Hackett said looking to abortion as a solution for the crime problem would be like killing prisoners and drug users to solve crime problems. "We're substituting one thing for another. We're not really solving our problems, we're just killing the people that we think create the problems," she said.

Source: Fox News; May 16, 2001 as quoted in the Pro-Life Infonet 5/17/01 #2433  The Pro-Life Infonet is a daily compilation of pro-life news and information. To subscribe, send the message "subscribe" to: infonet-request@prolifeinfo.org. Infonet is sponsored by Women and Children First (http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.org). For more pro-life info visit http://www.prolifeinfo.org and for questions or additional information email ertelt@prolifeinfo.org