[Free Beacon] Using data from the rise and fall of communism in Romania, a new paper suggests that abortion's effect on crime is minimal, once its effect on population size is properly accounted for.The paper, authored by economists Randi Hjalmarsson, Andreea Mitrut, and Cristian Pop-Eleches, looks at sudden changes in Romanian abortion law during and after the Ceaușescu regime. It shows that while overall numbers of crimes rose and fell in line with abortion, this effect vanishes when adjusting for the size of the population. This conclusion challenges prevailing explanations, including the idea that abortion reduces the number of "unwanted" children who might otherwise commit crimes.
The proposed link between abortion and crime has a long, and fraught, history. Back in 2001, economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt (the latter of Freakonomics fame) released a paper arguing that the legalization of abortion ‐ first in specific states, and then nationwide via Roe v. Wade ‐ drove the massive decline in crime from 1995 onwards, as children who would have been in their teens and early-to-mid 20s‐a high-crime age range‐simply were never born. They contended that this abortion effect accounts for up to 50 percent of the overall drop.
Donohue and Levitt argued that abortion affects crime through two mechanisms. One is cohort size ‐ if there are fewer kids, there will be fewer crimes in absolute terms. The other one, that the pair described as "far more interesting," is selection, i.e. "the possibility that abortion has a disproportionate effect on the births of those who are most at risk of engaging in criminal behavior."
