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

1. Introduction Every year, billions of crimes are committed. People are victims of murder, rape, robbery, fraud, and of various other misfortunes. The statistics around the world are very diversified; thus, some countries are positive examples of definite crime reduction trends; some, on the other hand, are the source of a constant flow of dreadful news. Therefore, a great deal of work is put into trying to understand what makes crime trends behave the way they do.

Such an interest in this topic even led to the development of a separate division of economics. More specifically, the start of this branch of behavioural economics is accredited to Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize laureate. Becker was the first to introduce a standard mathematical model of crime. His work dramatically changed the way crime is viewed by showing that it is not just explained by mental issues and social pressure, but rather by a range of definite factors that shape the deviant behaviour of a criminal. In his approach, Becker treats crime as any other result of a rational cost-benefit analysis of opportunities available for a person in the pursuit of maximum profit and benefit (Becker, 1968).

A fresh look at crime has spurred other researchers in the field of economics and other social sciences to study crime more thoroughly in order to understand what induces it and how it affects society. Consequently, a variety of studies has seen the world hypothesizing a range of ideas concerning both causes and consequences of crime and criminal behaviour.

Firstly, there is virtually no study that would suggest something other than the fact that crime harms humanity in all the possible ways, social, cultural, and, of course, economic. Every crime committed is a drawback for the human society: the social progress is slowed down; the cultural values are diminished to nothingness; the economies are inhibited. In the world of economics and finance, people view consequences of crime as more severe and premature business cycles, growth of unemployment, inflation, shortages, and economic depressions as well as, contraction of production, business activity, and development.

Consequently, the interest in the topic of crime has risen even more. Nowadays, there is a significant abundance of hypotheses; a lot of them are also of economic nature. Thus, some studies suggest that crime may be a reaction of the population to lack of proper employment; other studies claim that crime is a result of the low quality of human capital, i.e. low level of education of the population; some also state that it is the imperfection of judicial and law enforcement that mockingly encourages crime to thrive. These and other