Those who are born just a few years apart do much less crime than those who were born in the earlier years. Legalized abortion, they wrote, appears to account for as much as 50 % of the recent drop in crime. Levett and donahue would go on to publish their paper, the impact of legalized abortion on crime, in the may two thousand one issue of the quarterly journal of economics.
As the Supreme Court considers overturning Roe v. Wade, we look back at Steve Levitt’s controversial research on an unintended consequence of the 1973 ruling.