Abortion Has Become More Concentrated Among Poor Women 125 Maiden Lane, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10038 Ph 212 248 1111 Fax 212 248 1951 Rebecca Windmediaworks@guttmacher.org Tuesday, May 4, 2010 The proportion of abortion patients who were poor increased by almost 60%—from 27% in 2000 to 42% in 2008, according to “Characteristics of U.S. Abortion Patients, 2008,” by Rachel K. Jones, Lawrence B. The growing concentration of abortion among women with incomes below the federal poverty line likely reflects a combination of factors. “Gaps in unintended pregnancy and abortion between poor and more affluent women have been increasing since the mid-1990s, so—sadly—none of this comes as a surprise,” says Sharon L. Aside from poverty, little changed in the profile of women obtaining abortions between 2000 and 2008. For the first time, the survey on which this report is based asked abortion patients about their health insurance status and how they paid for abortion services. About the Survey Click here for “Characteristics of U.S. back to top
The politics of abortion: a historical ... [Womens Health Issues. 1993 On the Personhood of Pre-implantation Embryos Introduction It hardly needs to be argued that the fundamental issue at the crux of the abortion debate is the question of when personhood begins. This is self-evident. Abortion would be quite simply unthinkable if the fetus was viewed as an individual human person, rather than simply as a mass of living human cells which happens to be a potential person. The pro-life community in America, while not entirely monolithic even in this area, has nonetheless been dominated by a surprisingly united political and moral conviction on this question. By and large, they argue that human life and personhood begin at the moment of conception, which they almost universally define as fertilization.[1] Understandably, therefore, they have loudly decried as immoral all practices that involve the destruction of fertilized human eggs and resulting embryos, no matter how early in development. [It is] a scientific, indisputable fact that we have known [from] well before Roe v. Twinning and Recombination
Has Abortion Helped Lower The Crime Rate? According to a study by John J. Donohue III, Stanford Law School, and Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago, a large share of the drop in the crime rate, perhaps as much as half, can be traced to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion decision of 1972. That's because many of the children who might have grown up to commit those crimes were never born. Within a few years of the Roe decision, up to a quarter of pregnancies in the U.S. ended in abortion. An analysis of crime rates from 1985 to 1997 examines them as a function of abortion rates two decades before. The reason abortion has had an impact on the crime rate is the high incidence of abortion among mothers whose children are most likely to be at risk for future crime: teenagers, unmarried women and black women have higher rates of abortion, and their children are statistically at a higher risk for crime in adulthood. The economic benefit to society of abortion in reducing crime may be up to $30 billion annually.
Chicago economist links abortion to falling crime rates By Amy RustNews Office Presented at seminars at the University, Stanford and Harvard but not yet published, “Legalized Abortion and Crime,” Chicago economist Steven Levitt’s recent study that links the legalization of abortion to the country’s falling crime rate in the 1990s, already is receiving national attention. The study, co-authored by Levitt, Professor in Economics at Chicago, and Stanford University’s John Donohue III, suggests legalized abortion may be responsible for approximately half of the crime rate’s recent fall. According to the researchers, the decline of the U.S. crime rate may be the result of two mechanisms related to legalized abortion. Levitt and Donohue stress that their findings do not carry an endorsement of abortion. The study also reports that states such as California and New York, which legalized abortion before 1973, experienced a drop in their crime rates before the rest of the nation.
Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce NBER Working Paper No. 9532Issued in March 2003NBER Program(s): HC LE LS Donohue and Levitt (2001) present a number of analyses that suggest a causal link between legalized abortion and reductions in crime almost two decades later when the cohorts exposed to legalized abortion reach their peak crime years. Joyce (2003) challenges that finding. In this paper, we demonstrate that Joyce's failure to uncover a negative relationship between abortion and crime is a direct consequence of his decision to focus exclusively on the six-year period 1985-90 without including adequate controls for the crack epidemic. We provide empirical evidence that crack hit the high-abortion early legalizing states harder and earlier. The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. This paper is available as PDF (116 K) or via email. Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Published: Donohue III, John J. and Steven Levitt.
The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime NBER Working Paper No. 8004Issued in November 2000NBER Program(s): CH LE PE 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. This paper is available as PDF (217 K) or via email. Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Published: Donohue, John J., III and Steven D. Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded these: Abortion and crime: a new hypothesis The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed to a dramatic fall in crime rates in the United States, originally proposed by John Donohue and Steven Levitt in an article in 2001 and popularised by Levitt’s best selling book Freakonomics, has been the subject of close scrutiny by other academics. Until now, this scrutiny has focussed on issues of measurement and statistical specification, and there have been few serious attempts to test the Donohue and Levitt (henceforward D&L) hypothesis in countries other than the United States. In recent research, we analyse the impact of abortion on crime in England and Wales to attempt to rectify this gap in the evidence.1 Examining this question in the context of the UK is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that, in contrast to the US, in the UK, abortions are subject to mandatory reporting and, as a result, data on (legal) abortions are complete and of high quality. Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3.
Does abortion reduce crime rates? | The deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research In 2001 an article was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which the authors argued that legalized abortion reduces crime rates. The authors, economists John Dubner and Steven Levitt, examined the decrease in crime in the United States since the early 1990s and attribute it in large part to the legalization of abortion in 1973. The article immediately invoked heated debate, particularly because of its moral, social and political implications. Levitt later published the findings on the abortion-crime theory to a much broader audience in a chapter of his New York Times Bestseller, Freakonomics, which he coauthored with New York journalist Stephen J. Donohue and Levitt’s Abortion-Crime Theory In their article Donohue and Levitt acknowledge that a number of factors may have contributed to the falling rates crime rates during the 1990s. Crack Cocaine Epidemic Aggregate vs. In using the Supplemental Homicide Report from the CDC, Lott and Whitely uncover some startling results.
Abortion ProCon.org The Myth About Abortion and Crime This is the second part of a two part series on abortion. The first part can be found here. Violent crime in the United States soared after 1960. From 1960 to 1991, reported violent crime increased by an incredible 372 percent. Many plausible explanations have been advanced for the drop during the 1990s. Yet, of all the explanations, perhaps the most controversial is the one that attributes lower crime rates in the ’90s to Roe v. It is an attention-grabbing theory, to be sure, possibly even more noteworthy than recent research indicating that liberalizing abortion increased pre-marital sex, increased out-of-wedlock births, reduced adoptions and ended so-called shotgun marriages. But a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to the opposite conclusion: that abortion increases crime. The question about abortion and crime was greatly influenced by a Swedish study published in 1966 by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe. Even in the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v.
Does Abortion Lower Crime Rates? Why did crime, which rose steadily thru the 1970s and 1980s, suddenly reverse itself and start dropping? Violent crime became a fact of life in American cities in the 1970s, and New York was especially scary. In 1979, New York City saw 16 murders committed in the subways alone. And the problem seemed unsolvable. "The rise in crime, although something that troubled people, was pretty much taken as kind of the way it is," Finckenauer said. But then, something surprising happened: throughout the 1990s, the crime rate plunged, and experts are still debating the reason for the drop in crime. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of "Freakonomics," think they know the real reason, and their conclusions have generated a fair amount of controversy. How could abortion affect crime rates? Crime and Punishment There was no shortage of politicians taking credit for making the streets safer for Americans. And in California, Gov. But who was right? The Unborn Criminal "It's a very simple theory.