Business Week, September 27, 1999
DOES ABORTION LOWER THE CRIME RATE?
A new study contends that falling crime rate in the 1990s is due to the rise in abortions after Roe vs. Wade.  Crime in the U.S. has fallen dramatically since 1991.   By 1998, the homicide rate was down by more than one-third, and the rates for all violent crime and property crime were each down by around one-quarter.
A recent study, "Legalized Abortion and Crime" by Professors John Donohue of the Stanford University Law School and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago, proposes a new causal factor:  the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s.   The idea is that these children who were not born would have been disproportionately likely to grow up in poverty and on welfare with a young and poorly educated single parent.  Because these factors are known to breed crime, the children no born would have been prime candidates to be criminals 15 to 25 years later.   Hence, the absence of these children contributes to the drop in crime rates since 1991.  Their preliminary reseach supports this claim.
Business Week, July 9, 2001
ABORTION'S RISE AND CRIME'S FALL
Is there a relationship between the rise in abortions in the 1970s and the drop in crime in the 1990s?  Not according to Ted Joyce of Baruch College and his new analysis, which questions the results of a controversial study by John Donohue of Stanford University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago released several years ago.
Ted Joyce studied states that legalized abortion in 1970, analyzing the changes in crime rates specifically among teenagers and young adults born in the years before and after 1970.  He then compared these changes to changes in crime rates in the states that had not yet implemented legalized abortion.  He found no significant difference in the crime rates.
Joyce concludes that the apparent link between rising abortion rate and the declining crime rate is coincidental rather than causal.  The most likely explanation, he says, is that "crack cocaine" and its violent spillover effects which exploded in the 1980s began to ebb in the early 1990s, just as the post-Roe vs. Wade kids were entering their teenage years.