The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, Results of a Global Legal Study and a Factual Study...

3. Methodology 3.1 The approach to the global study of the abortion legalization effect on the homicide rate and data overview In order to define the purpose of this work, it should be pointed out that its initial hypothesis confirms the existence of a correlation between legal abortions and crime, and that it is negative, i.e. a large number of legal abortions causes a reduction in the crime rate.

Evidently, the next step after building the theoretical foundation of the core idea of this work is supporting it sufficiently with our empirical findings. Looking back at the referenced authors, it is clear that the most prevalent approach to the matter of the effect of legal abortions on the crime rate in any given country is a particular country’s abortion and crime data analysis of any kind.

The inspiration for this work, “The impact of legalized abortions on crime” written by John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt, uses this particular approach to analyse the time series data of various nature, presenting it as empirical support for the hypothesis that legal abortions bring down the level of crime on the example of the USA. Having in mind the above-mentioned experience and other previous research studies of the effect of the legal abortion on crime in addition to innovations of this paper, the empirical findings of this work are being built upon two approaches, not including explicit plain crime trend overview before and after the legalisation of abortions could have impacted it.

The approaches differ in the kind of data analysed, methods, models, and other nuances even though serving the same goal of testing the initial hypothesis.

The first approach is based on dealing with broad global data concerning the legal statuses of abortions in various countries all around the world and the intentional homicides that have happened in these countries during the period between 1998 and 2017, i.e. 20 years. Together with other variables, the abortions and homicide variables make up a panel dataset.

Even though the homicide variable used in the model is a dependent variable, in this case it is a relatively simple set of data of intentional homicides per 100,000 people in a country during a given year that has been provided by the World Bank (2020). It has been chosen as a representation of the crime rate just like it has been used in the majority of other studies in this field. Murder or