Has any scholar out there found any definitive evidence to suggest a direct, causal relationship between legal abortion and crime rates or is it all just sociological theory? Just because a correlation exists between two variables doesn't mean that one causes the other directly.
The Donahue and Levitt was a peer reviewed study put forth by two professors (Stanford and U of Chicago) so it is not like they are just a couple of nut jobs spewing off ideas. It is a theory of about why crime decreased in the 90's. There is no way do prove definitively that it is 100% true, but that doesn't mean that you can dismiss it as 100% false.
Exactly.
This is why I said it has the same sentiment as a nazi program.
There is no program. They studied something (that already existed) looked at the stats and said, wow- it seems there is a correlation there.
1) Five states legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. Crime started falling three years earlier in these states, with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime.
2) After abortion was legalized, the availability of abortions differed dramatically across states. In some states like North Dakota and in parts of the deep South, it was virtually impossible to get an abortion even after Roe v. Wade. If one compares states that had high abortion rates in the mid 1970s to states that had low abortion rates in the mid 1970s, you see the following patterns with crime. For the period from 1973-1988, the two sets of states (high abortion states and low abortion states) have nearly identical crime patterns. Note, that this is a period before the generations exposed to legalized abortion are old enough to do much crime. So this is exactly what the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. But from the period 1985-1997, when the post Roe cohort is reaching peak crime ages, the high abortion states see a decline in crime of 30% relative to the low abortion states. Our original data ended in 1997. If one updated the study, the results would be similar.)
3) All of the decline in crime from 1985-1997 experienced by high abortion states relative to low abortion states is concentrated among the age groups born after Roe v. Wade. For people born before abortion legalization, there is no difference in the crime patterns for high abortion and low abortion states, just as the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts.
4) When we compare arrest rates of people born in the same state, just before and just after abortion legalization, we once again see the identical pattern of lower arrest rates for those born after legalization than before.
5) The evidence from Canada, Australia, and Romania also support the hypothesis that abortion reduces crime.
