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Fed Economists Challenge 'Freakonomics' Abortion Crime Claim

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Abortion has reduced the crime rate since it was legalized in the early 1970s, claims "Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt, but economists from the Boston Fed are challenging that claim.

Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and New York Times writer Stephen Dubner penned the best selling "Freakonomics,” which uses statistics to study what the Wall Street Journal describes as "the hidden truths of everything.”

Levitt’s abortion research, first published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, was the result of earlier statistical studies Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue, conducted on the subject.

They theorized that unwanted babies are more likely to become troubled children, prone to crime and drug use, than are wanted children, and suggest that the missing aborted children caused a drop in crime nearly two decades later when that generation would have come of age.

Not so fast, say two economists, Christopher Foote, a senior

economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Christopher Goetz, a research assistant there. They take aim at the statistics behind Levitt's claim, insisting that the research behind that conclusion is faulty.

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The Journal reports that Foote says there was a "missing formula” in Levitt's original research allowing him to ignore certain factors that may have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s. He also argues that in producing the research, Levitt should have counted per-capita arrests, not the overall arrest numbers. After Foote adjusted for both factors, the abortion effect simply disappeared.

"There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the Foote and Goetz assert in their report.

Their work, incidentally doesn't represent the Fed's official view.

While acknowledging the programming error, Levitt says taken by itself, that error doesn't put much of a dent in his work. Moreover, Levitt says the abortion theory has held up when examined in other countries, like Canada and Australia, and when applied to other subjects, like drug use. "Does this change my mind on the issue? Absolutely not," Mr. Levitt told the Journal.

This, however, is not the first time Mr. Levitt's abortion research has come under attack, the Journal notes, adding that other academics have tried to poke holes in it, and critics across the political spectrum found the research itself offensive.

Conservatives were appalled that it found such positive consequences from a practice many of them found immoral. Liberals felt it smacked of eugenics.

Moreover, the idea that aborting babies might be justified because it allegedly can reduce crime brings to mind the furor caused by Bill Bennett's statement that it could be said that aborting black babies would reduce crime rates. The fact that Bennett said "That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down," did not prevent him from being roundly condemned - a fate Levitt has escaped.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who helped in Levitt's original submission to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, told the Journal that on the one hand, Foote's critique suggests the impact of abortion on crime has not been as strong as Levitt has argued, and on the other, "These guys [Foote and his research assistant] have put the [data] through the wringer … There is no question that the results get smaller and weaker, but there still seems to be something there."

Editor's note: