In the last decades of the 20th century the crime rate in the United States was raging fast. But in the 1990s, it started to drop sharply and unexpectedly. There were different theories tossing around about its roots. However, the most compelling and interesting explanation was published in a paper in 2001. The paper then was turned into a chapter in the best-seller book of “Freakonomics”. The authors argued that the fall in the crime rate is indeed an unintended byproduct of 1973 abortion laws. The explanation was simple and intuitive. Those who commit crimes are mostly from the pool of people who are unintended children of their parents. As this pool population has diminished thanks to abortion law, the crimes were also declining.
The parents and mothers put less time and energy toward kids who are not generated with intention, but they were not able to abort because it was illegal according to the law.
At the end of the 2001 paper, the authors made an interesting prediction about the future. If all else remains equal, the decline in crimes would continue in the next two decades. As there is a wide lag between the implementation of the abortion law and time in which people, particularly younger people, perform crimes. In 2001, they predicted that in the next twenty years, the crime rate would diminish 1 percent per year.
In 2020, the authors published another paper, testing whether their predictions nineteenth years ago were indeed correct or not. The results show the decline in crimes was at least as strong as their predictions in 2001. In fact, abortion had declined 62.2 percent in high-abortion states and only 3.1 percent in low abortion states.
Yet many people and even some economists are arguing about the validity of this explanation. However, this resistance is because aborting when the fetus is older than a threshold age is highly unethical and there is a strong political debate over it.
Source: Economist
