"Why is an academic study, which concludes that abortion increases crime, getting so little media attention?" asked Ed Szymkowiak, national director of STOPP International, a project of American Life League. "Two years ago, when different researchers released a study which claimed that abortion decreases crime, it made national headlines for months."
A May 2001 study by John R. Lott of Yale Law School and John Whitley of the University of Adelaide School of Economics in Australia concludes that legalized abortion in the United States resulted in higher crime rates.
Lott and Whitley cite research that suggests that abortion creates a social climate that encourages out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families, which in turn tend to produce children more likely to commit crime.
The two researchers also expose the flawed methodology of the earlier headline-grabbing study by John Donohue and Steven Levitt, "The Impact of Legalizing Abortion on Crime Rates," which claims that abortion reduces crime.
On page 19 of their study, Lott and Whitley point to statistical evidence that shows legalizing abortion increased murder rates "by around 0.5 to 7 percent." On page 18, the researchers note, "The higher estimated increases in murder imply that legalizing abortion raised the number of murders in 1998 by 1,230 and raised total annual victimization costs from all crime by at least $4.5 billion."
The Lott and Whitley study, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births," is available online from the Social Science Research Network.
Release issued: 7 Sept 01
