Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (18 page)

In contrast, if abortion is legal, the incentives are different. Knowing that the abortion option is there to save them from raising an unexpected
child, women who are willing to have an abortion—as well as men in general—become less concerned with contraceptives and more likely to engage in premarital sex. As more women have premarital sex, social mores become more accommodating to the practice. This creates social pressure on other women to have premarital sex, including women who would never have an abortion. Increasing rates of premarital sex among these latter women leads to higher pregnancy rates. The result is rising numbers of women who are single, pregnant, and unwilling to have an abortion.

Indeed, multiple studies have shown that legalized abortion, by raising the rate of unprotected premarital sex, increases the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.
³⁰
From the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5 percent in 1965-69 to over 16 percent twenty years later (1985-1989). For African Americans, the numbers jumped from 35 percent to 62 percent. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was nevertheless a key contributing factor.

Let’s return to the personal level. In an environment of legal abortion, a man might well
expect
his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter results in an unplanned pregnancy. But what happens if the woman refuses? Maybe she is morally opposed to abortion, or perhaps she thought she could have an abortion, but upon becoming pregnant, she decides that she can’t go through with it. What happens then?

Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking “I never wanted a baby; it’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself.” What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. The evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended “shot-gun” marriages, where men reacted to an unplanned pregnancy by doing the honorable thing—marrying their
partner. But with abortion as a legal option, men became more reluctant to stay with a woman who refuses to have one.
³¹

What happens to these babies of reluctant fathers? The mothers often end up raising the child on their own, as single mothers have become much less likely to give their children up for adoption. Even as out-of-wedlock births have surged, adoption rates have plummeted. In the two decades before
Roe
, 19.3 percent of babies born to unwed white mothers were placed for adoption and 1.5 percent for unwed black mothers. From 1973 to 1981, those percentages fell to 7.6 and 0.2 percent, respectively, and continued to decline thereafter.
³²
How can we explain this? As stated above, after
Roe
, a rising number of out-of-wedlock children were born to women who opposed abortion, or at least would not have one themselves. These women have also proved less willing to give up their children for adoption.

With work and other demands on their time, single parents, no matter how “wanted” their child may be, tend to devote less attention to their children than do married couples; after all, it’s difficult for one person to spend as much time with a child as two people can. Grand-parents and other relatives may sometimes help out, but on average, the children of single parents still receive less care.

The children of unmarried, cohabitating couples also receive less care and attention than married couples’ children. This is partly because cohabiting partners face much higher separation rates than married couples do.
³³
Many cohabitating couples are not married because they are not yet ready to make a lifetime commitment to each other. And if partners believe their relationship may not be permanent, they are less likely to make career adjustments or other sacrifices for the sake of their family. Thus, single parents and unmarried couples are less likely than married parents to read to their children or take them on excursions, and more likely to feel angry at their children or feel that their children are burdensome. Children raised outside of wedlock experience a higher rate of social problems in nearly every area than
children of married couples. Unsurprisingly, children from unmarried families are also more likely to grow up to commit crimes.
³⁴

So the opposing arguments are clear—one stresses that abortion eliminates “unwanted” children, while the other emphasizes that abortion increases out-of-wedlock births. Both effects, conceivably, could be
occurring at the same time. The question is: which one has the bigger impact on crime?

This must be answered empirically. Unfortunately for advocates of the “abortion decreases crime” theory, Donahue and Levitt’s data were undermined by methodological flaws. As
The Economist
magazine noted in an article entitled “Oops-onomics,” “Donohue and Levitt did not run the test that they thought they had.”
³⁶
Work by two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, found that when the tests were run correctly, they indicated that abortion actually
increases
violent crime.
³⁷
I co-authored a study with John Whitley that found a similar connection between abortion and murder—namely, that legalizing abortion raised the murder rate, on average, by about 7 percent.
³⁸

We find particularly troublesome problems with the “abortion decreases crime” theory when we analyze the population according to age group. Suppose that liberalizing abortion in the early 1970s can indeed explain up to 80 percent of the drop in murder during the 1990s, as Donohue and Levitt claim. Then the impact of deregulating abortion, undoubtedly, would first reduce criminality among age groups born after the abortion law was changed, when the “unwanted,” crime-prone elements of these groups began to be weeded out through abortion. Yet, looking at the declining murder rate during the 1990s, Whitley and I found that this is not the case at all. Instead, the rate of committing murder began falling first among an older generation—those twenty-six and older—who were born
before
the
Roe v. Wade
decision.
³⁹
It was only later that criminality among those born after
Roe
began to decline as well.

This pattern is more consistent with the theory that legalizing abortion led to a rise in crime. In fact, those born in the four years after
Roe
were much
more
likely to commit murder than those born in the four years prior to
Roe
. This was especially the case when they were in their teens—in other words, in their “criminal prime.”

And that’s not all. The “abortion decreases crime” argument encounters further inconsistencies when we compare U.S. crime and abortion trends to those in Canada. While crime rates in both the United States and Canada began declining at the same time, Canada liberalized its abortion laws much later than the U.S. did. Although the province of Quebec effectively legalized abortion in late 1976, it wasn’t until 1988, in a case originating in Ontario, that the Canadian Supreme Court struck down limits on abortion nationwide.
⁴⁰
If the legalization of abortion in the U.S. caused crime to begin dropping eighteen years later, why did the crime rate begin falling just three years after the comparable legal change in Canada?

In sum, even if one effect of abortion were to lower crime by culling out “unwanted” children—a conclusion derived from flawed statistics—the effect is greatly outweighed by the rise in crime that abortion causes by increasing out-of-wedlock births. It should be noted that African Americans are disproportionately harmed by the crime stemming from legalized abortion. That population has seen the biggest increases in abortion, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, resulting in more African Americans being raised by single parents and eventually committing crimes, mostly against other African Americans.
⁴¹

Thus, “legalized” abortion actually served to increase crime since the 1970s. However this effect—both among African Americans and the population at large—was more than offset by other factors that caused the massive drop in crime of the 1990s. Before discussing these aspects, let’s look at one other factor that proved counter-productive in fighting crime.

Many police departments implemented affirmative action policies in the 1990s, just as the crime rate was entering a steep decline. But a close study reveals that crime fell despite these programs, not because of them. Perhaps most unexpectedly, these policies not only resulted in the hiring of less qualified women and minorities, but also of less qualified white applicants as well.

We must specify at the outset that crime rates did not rise due to the hiring of more women and minorities per se. Rather, the fault lies with the particular affirmative action rules that were adopted. There is little doubt that adding women and minorities to an all-male, all-white police force carries substantial benefits. Minority police officers often function more effectively than whites in minority areas. Since minority residents tend to vest more trust in minority officers, they are often more forthcoming with information that leads to arrests and convictions of criminals. Especially if the minority police officers grew up in the community they are patrolling, they may also be better at predicting the behavior of criminals in those areas. Furthermore, minorities are essential for various kinds of undercover operations, such as infiltrating race-based gangs. Likewise, female officers tend to elicit more information and honest reports of rape and spousal abuse from female victims, and they are much more able than men to carry out certain operations such as prostitution stings.

But affirmative action programs are not simply focused on achieving these benefits of a diverse police force. Instead, the trend has been toward boosting minority representation in a police department so that it reflects the demographic ratio of the surrounding community. The two goals are not necessarily the same, and the methods used to achieve the latter objective, unfortunately, have reduced the effectiveness of police in stopping crime.

Affirmative action policies have sought to transform traditional police hiring standards that rely on intelligence exams, strength tests, and criminal background checks. Because, on average, women are less likely to pass strength tests than are males, while African Americans have lower passing rates on intelligence exams and criminal background checks than whites, many police departments adopted new standards in an effort to increase minority hiring.

Police affirmative action programs have entailed two main approaches. The first is to lower testing standards across the board until they produce equal pass rates among minority and non-minority groups. This approach has become increasingly common over the last few decades. A leading method here has been to replace cognitive or intelligence exams with more nebulous psychological tests that aim to gauge a candidate’s temperament. Asking questions such as what is an applicant’s favorite color and whether he watches much television, the tests are designed to produce equal pass rates across different groups of applicants.
⁴²
According to a 1993 survey of twenty-three large police and sheriff’s departments, twenty departments had reduced their emphasis on cognitive skill testing due to the tests’ “adverse impact” on minority hiring.
⁴³
The other three departments had completely eliminated cognitive testing in hopes of increasing minority recruitment. An example of the meager new hiring standards is that to pass the reading test, “applicants had to score only as well as the bottom 1 percent of current police officers.”
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