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

5. Conclusion Abortions have always been a controversial issue in society. There are two major groups in the world, voting for and against abortions. The author of this work does not take any sides in this debate while reviewing the ongoing dispute about legalized abortions and crime raised by Donohue and Levitt (2001). In their view, the legalization of abortions in the USA in 1973 with the legal case of Roe v Wade was the major reason for a tremendous drop in the crime rate in the USA, and NYC in particular, in the early 1990s. They argued that pregnancies unwanted due to a great range of reasons result in births of children that are unloved, raised in inappropriate conditions and surroundings, etc. Such children also prove to be a group at risk of committing crime in the future. Thus, a legal opportunity to stop such pregnancies, in view of Donohue and Levitt, would prevent the potential crime from happening. Both the statement and the research have been criticized by some researchers as well as supported by others. The disputes between economists and sociologists studying this issue are additionally spiced up with the question of morality. Thus, the purpose of this thesis has been also to review the original statement.

Thereby, econometric methods of analysis are applied to particular data with the purpose of confirming or rejecting of the results obtained by Donohue and Levitt. This work targets major dimensions of legal abortions. The first one is the legality of abortion itself. Data on 44 countries during the period of 1998 to 2017 are used in this part of the research. The data take into account the degree of freedom of abortion policies in terms of legal reasons to permit abortions and additional time limitations applied to those legal grounds, the so-called gestational limits. The abortion data are used together with the homicide data, which account for the number of intentionally killed people per 100,000 po­pulation. The results clearly indicate that the countries with higher freedom of abortion-related policies, i.e. with more legal grounds implied and higher gestational limits also have a lower level of the homicide rate. The methods applied enable us to claim that the introduction of abortion policies which would account for an increase of the INDEX estimator by 1 would lower the homicide rate by approximately 0.5 homicides per 100,000 population. The effect of policies implied may vary from country to country due to the difference in cultures and social norms. Ne­vertheless, it clearly is a piece of evidence in favour of the hypothesis popularized by Donohue and Levitt.

The second dimension of the research is concerned with the actual figures of abortions conducted. This part of the analysis follows the pattern outline by