"We really, in some ways, lost the media battle because we looked stupid," he says. The error was almost more in the er description of the paper, rather than an actual mathematical so we had said that we had controlled for state year effects in our paper." But by the time donahue and levitt corrected their work and found that the correction did not weaken their hypothesis "the headlines had already been written", adds Donahue.
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.