Freakonomics Crime and Abortion

Mohammed 2 egalized abortion would have been 50% more likely than average to live in poverty. ” This statistic that researchers discovered reinforced the belief that if a woman did not want to have a child because of personal reasons or because she was not ready and if there was an abortion ban, the child would most likely grow up in a poor household and have a higher risk of engaging in criminal activity once they reached adulthood. It is reasoned that because abortion was legalized twenty years before, an entire generation of children with a higher risk of becoming criminals were not born and that’s why the crime rate dropped.

The fallacy that is apparent when attempting to explain a crime drop with an abortion increase is that the two are simply correlated and not necessarily causal. The authors refute that claim by providing evidence that there is a link between abortion and crime. “Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with lower abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops” (4).

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The evidence regarding state data is pretty compelling especially when put in the framework of post-Roe v.

Wade and the generational gap that follows the Supreme Court decision. Although there seems to be a link between abortion and the crime rate, it all comes down to how a person’s own beliefs will influence them to interpret the data. Conclusions can be drawn to support different viewpoints and once the moral implications of abortion are taken into consideration, then it no longer becomes a logical argument.

Works Cited Levitt, Steven D. Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics. New York, Harper Collins, 2005.