TY  - JOUR
AU  - Donohue,John
AU  - Levitt,Steven
TI  - The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8004
PY  - 2000
Y2  - November 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8004
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8004.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John J. Donohue
Stanford Law School
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/721-6339
E-Mail: donohue@law.stanford.edu

Steven D. Levitt
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/834-1862
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: slevitt@midway.uchicago.edu
AB  - We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.
ER  -