The Impact of Legalized Abortion On Crime - History of Argument

History of Argument

The 1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future is one of the better known early versions of this claim, but it was not the first. The Commission cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion "turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance." A 1966 study by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe was cited by the Rockefeller Commission and is probably the first serious empirical research on this topic. They studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these "unwanted" children to another group – the next child born after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The "unwanted" children were more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes and were more likely to become delinquents and engaged in crime. Supreme Court Justice Blackmun opinion in Roe v. Wade also referenced the social and private problems "of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it." Levitt and Donohue revived discussion of this issue with their paper, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime."