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. 2017 Oct;63(11):1458-1490.
doi: 10.1177/0011128715615882. Epub 2015 Nov 18.

Crime, Teenage Abortion, and Unwantedness

Gary L Shoesmith  1
Affiliations

Crime, Teenage Abortion, and Unwantedness

Gary L Shoesmith. Crime Delinq. 2017 Oct.

Abstract

This article disaggregates Donohue and Levitt's (DL's) national panel-data models to the state level and shows that high concentrations of teenage abortions in a handful of states drive all of DL's results in their 2001, 2004, and 2008 articles on crime and abortion. These findings agree with previous research showing teenage motherhood is a major maternal crime factor, whereas unwanted pregnancy is an insignificant factor. Teenage abortions accounted for more than 30% of U.S. abortions in the 1970s, but only 16% to 18% since 2001, which suggests DL's panel-data models of crime/arrests and abortion were outdated when published. The results point to a broad range of future research involving teenage behavior. A specific means is proposed to reconcile DL with previous articles finding no relationship between crime and abortion.

Keywords: crime; disaggregation; hypergeometric distributions; panel-data estimation; teenage abortion.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Violent crime long differences with fitted values for 36 and 50 states. Note. Graph uses 2001 data set; top 14 states in Table 4 are in ( ); bottom 14 in [ ].
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Property crime long differences with fitted values for 36 and 50 states. Note. Graph uses 2001 data set; top 14 states in Table 4 are in ( ); bottom 14 in [ ].
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Teenage abortion ratios and ranked significance of abortion modeling crime. Note. Teenage weighted abortion ratios are for 1988; top 14 states in ( ); bottom 14 in [ ].
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
U.S. teenage (15-19) abortion ratio.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Teenage abortion rates and ranked significance of abortion modeling crime. Note. Teenage abortion rates are for 1988; top 14 states are in ( ); bottom 14 in [ ].
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Difference in teenage and adult abortion rates and ranked abortion significance. Note. Differences in abortion rates are for 1988; top 14 states are in ( ); bottom 14 in [ ].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Chamlin M. B., Myer A. J., Sanders B. A., Cochran J. K. (2008). Abortion as crime control: A cautionary tale. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 19, 135-152.

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