RESEARCHERS FIND ‘NO CLEAR LINK’ BETWEEN

ABORTION AND CRIME IN THE UK

New research by economists from the United States and the UK has been unable to find a link between the legalisation of abortion and reductions in crime in England and Wales.

The report by Professor David Paton and colleagues investigates whether the legalisation of abortion in 1967 might have contributed to lower crime rates some years later. The possibility that abortion might lead to lower crime first arose from research by Steve Levitt and the idea was popularised in Levitt’s bestseller Freakonomics, written with Stephen Donohue.

Levitt and Donohue argued that abortion reduces the number of unwanted babies and those born in difficult circumstances. As crime is more prevalent among such groups, then crime rates should fall when the babies who were aborted would have reached their peak crime ages. In fact, crime rates in the United States did indeed start to fall 17 to 18 years after Roe versus Wade, the ruling that prevented individual states from restricting abortion.

Although other researchers have re-examined the Levitt data and cast some doubt on their findings, this new report is the first systematically to examine whether abortion might have reduced crime outside the United States.

The authors of the UK report have widely differing personal views on abortion and claim (as did Levitt in the United States) that their research is not about whether legalising abortion is right or wrong per se, but is purely aimed at trying to identify possible practical consequences of legalisation.

In the report, they examined recorded crime rates and conviction rates across all English and Welsh police force areas up to 2004 finding that, for some crime categories at least, rates started to fall in the mid-1990s. This was about the same time as the fall in crime in the United States, despite the fact that abortion in the UK was legalised about five years earlier.

Other crime categories (in particular violent crime) increased throughout the time period. Furthermore, crime in the England and Wales appears to have increased (or fallen less fast) relative to other European countries such as Ireland where abortion remained illegal.

The authors go on to conduct a series of statistical tests in which they control for a huge range of other factors that may have affected crime rates, including different ways in which crime is recorded across police force areas, unemployment, education, policing levels and so on. They report that although some of their statistical results suggest the same relationship between abortion and crime found by Levitt, the association breaks down under the scrutiny of a range of sensitivity checks.

Commentators have pointed out that for the abortion-crime hypothesis to be true, crime rates should fall first among the youngest age groups as they would have been the first ones to have been potentially affected by abortion. In fact, as one of the authors, Dr Rob Simmons of Lancaster University, explained:

‘When we look at the number of convictions among each age group, if anything we find evidence that crime rates fell slower among those age groups who were born after abortion was legalised relative to rates among those age groups born before legalisation.’

‘The report suggests a possible reason for this result is that legalised abortion and improved access to contraception may have led to greater out-of-wedlock births. If true, and if children of out-of-wedlock births have a greater propensity to a life of crime as grow older, then a positive relationship between abortion and subsequent crime may be observed.’

Professor Paton of Nottingham University Business School added:

‘In the majority of our statistical tests, we are unable to find evidence that abortion reduced crime in England and Wales. But it is no easy job trying to establish a relationship between legalisation of abortion on the one hand and crime rates some years later and so we cannot completely rule out a link between the two.’

ENDS

Notes for editors: ‘Did Abortion Cut Crime in England and Wales?’ by David Paton, Rob Simmons and Leo Kahane was presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2007 annual conference at the University of Warwick, 11-13 April.

David Paton is at Nottingham University Business School. Rob Simmons is at Lancaster University. Leo Kahane is at California State University East Bay.

For further information: contact David Paton on 0115 846 6601 (email: ); Rob Simmons on 01524 594234 (email: ); for US enquiries, Leo Kahane on +1 510-885-3369, (email: ); or Romesh Vaitilingam on 07768-661095 (email: ).