Abortion and Crime

Here's an article in the Wall Street Journal on a paper published by Christopher Foote, a Federal Reserve Bank economist and research assistant Christopher Goetz.

The paper comments on the abortion-crime link that Stephen Levitt, author of Freakonomics, researched and wrote about in his book and in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The Boston Fed's Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the programming of Mr. Levitt's original research. He argues the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect 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 authors assert in the report.