THE EFFECT OF LEGALISED ABORTION ON CRIME AND THE COMMUNITY

Sometimes referred to as the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis is the theory that legal abortion reduces crime. Those who promote this theory generally argue that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot, or are incapable, of caring for them are more likely to become criminals and that it is theorised that the availablity of abortion has supposedly an observable effect on crime.

The counter arguement of the anti-abortion lobby is that the termination of a faetus is in itself a crime, especially in those states that believe that God is the only decision maker. There is an arguement that in countries where abortion is legal has reduced crime but opponets argue that data is data is date and proves nothing and that reduced crime comes about in other ways.

There have been no studies in Australia to argue either way and generally we accept that women have the right to make decisions about their own body wether it be tits, tattoos or terminations.

There was a study in 1972 in the United States (that’s more than a generation ago) that was able to prove that the children of women denied an abortion turned out to have been, with a control group, registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more anti-social and criminal behaviour and more likely to be on ‘public assistance’ for much of their life.This study argued that the social cost to society economically far outweighed the cost of allowing termination even if paid for from the public purse.

Even earlier studies in Sweden in1966 which looked at the long term data from 188 women denied abortions between 1939 and 1941. They compared these unwanted children to another group, the next child born after each of the unwanted babies, as a control group.

What they found was the unwanted children were more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in alternate care, including extended family and in the worst case scenarios as a Ward of the State. Their liklihood of becoming delinquent, drug dependent and engaged in crime was about double that of the control group brought up under normal societal conditions of that time
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In the Roe vs Wade case, which is still a highly charged arguement in the America, where abortion was made legal federally but then subject to the laws of individual states, has resulted in a hodge-podge of laws either side of imaginary geographical lines. Their arguement was ‘too many social and private problems occured bringing a child into a family already unable to, financially or psychologically, care for it.’

The on-the-run decision making by Trump that women who have abortions should be punished is absolutely mysogenistic, one hopes he doesn’t get to the Whitehouse even as an aide.