Paperback Abortion

Freakonomics, Market Populism AndthatAbortion-and-Crime Theory

Bibliographic Data

ID5854403
AuthorsKate Gleeson (0000-0003-2539-5910)
Year2011
Volume26
Issue68
Pages167-192
Publication date2011-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Feminist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1321-7568 • E-ISSN: 1465-3303
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08164649.2011.574598
OpenAlexW2335389980
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited48

In 2005 Freakonomics popularised the abortion-and-crime theory based on the microeconomic model of fertility control that was buoyed by the phenomenal ubiquity of market populism at the time. In its massive popularity, the book filled the popular bandwidth with a simple caricature of abortion as an individual economic preference, the demand for which might simply be switched on or off by the prevailing market conditions of the day. This, potentially, has great implications for women's reproductive history, and for the contemporary conceptualisation of abortion as a medical need. In this article I interrogate the abortion-and-crime theory in order to expose its tendentious character as driven by market populism and outdated economic models that have long been a focus for feminist criticism. I highlight the lack of interrogation, both academic and popular, that was afforded the basic premise of the abortion-and-crime theory, in an ideological climate that at the time was overwhelmingly in thrall to market populism as promoted by neo-liberalism. Notes 1. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for advice on this article. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association conference at the University of Queensland in July 2008. Thanks to John Buchanan, Alan Fenna, Joy Paton, Marian Sawer and Hans Van Leeuwen for comments on earlier drafts. Eternal thanks to Anna Fitch for arguing with me. Research for this article was conducted with the support of a Macquarie University Research Fellowship and an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (Discovery Grant DP0986934, 2009–2013). The idea that abortion prevents criminals is not new; see, for example, Jurka (1968). 2. In 1999 Posner was commenting on a draft of the abortion and crime theory. 3. Levitt is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; he has been recognised as 'the most influential economist in America under the age of 40' and one of Time magazine's '100 People Who Shape Our World'. His co-author, journalist Stephen Dubner, is an established author and has written for the New York Timesand the New Yorker. 4. Foote and Goetz, writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, identified the regression analysis used by Donohue and Levitt as flawed and argued that on correction there is no statistical evidence from their data that the foetuses aborted post-Roe would have been any more likely to grow up to commit crimes, had they not been aborted, than the people who developed from pregnancies carried to term in that era (2005). A similar study undertaken in the United Kingdom failed to produce a correlation to support the American theory (Kahane, Paton, and Simmons 2005), but Levitt claims a Canadian regression analysis supports his own (Levitt and Dubner 2005, 129). Levitt responded to Foote and Goetz in the second edition of Freakonomics, and to Joyce in Donohue and Levitt (2004). Levitt and Dubner claim that an Australian study identifies a similar link between legalised abortion and crime (2005, 129). In fact, that study states only that 'the potential certainly seems to exist' that legal abortion impacted on homicide rates in Australia: there are no Australian national abortion statistics (until 1998 only South Australia kept statistics) and no homicide statistics identified by age of perpetrator by which to test the theory (Leigh and Wolfers 2000). Levitt has also been criticised for misrepresenting Cristian Pop-Eleches's study of abortion in Romania (DiNardo 2006). 5. In September 2005 Bill Bennet (former education secretary under Reagan) referred to Freakonomics on his morning radio program and claimed that aborting 'every black baby in this country' would reduce the crime rate (Levitt and Dubner 2005, 252–56). 6. Donohue and Levitt acknowledge their 'assumption of no prelegalisation abortions' and claim that this actually 'unambiguously leads us to understate the true impact on abortion on crime', because of the bias of their regression analysis: by assuming the no prelegalisation abortions were occurring, we systematically overstate the increase in abortions associated with legalisation, especially in the states with the highest legal abortion rates (because these same states likely had the highest illegal abortion rates). The measured change in crime on the other hand, is unaffected by the exaggerated estimate of the change in abortion. Thus the abortion coefficients are biased towards zero: the regression believes that the change in crime was induced by a larger shock to abortion than actually occurred and thus attributes a smaller impact per abortion than is actually the case. (Donohue and Levitt 2004, 36) 7. In their similar study of the United Kingdom, Kahane, Paton, and Simmons dismiss with no verification, high estimates for illegal abortion in the United Kingdom as 'usually proposed by organisations campaigning for abortion legalisation', therefore inflated and inaccurate (2005). 8. Every US State made abortion a crime; all but Louisiana made exception by statute or case law (Ziff 1969, 4). While most States allowed for terminations only when the woman's life was deemed to be at risk, Alabama, Massachusetts and the District of Colombia recognised legal grounds for protecting the woman's health (Merz, Jackson, and Klerman 1995). 9. The rate of prosecution for abortion, the 'third biggest illegal endeavour in the US, surpassed only by gambling and narcotics' from the late 1800s to the 1960s was 'more than merely low', it was 'amazingly low'. Convicted abortionists (usually implicated in a woman's serious illness or death) were dealt with leniently, often with probation (Kaplan 1988, 165–67). See also Columbia Law Review 1935. 10. Repeated studies throughout the first half of the twentieth century suggest that around one in five pregnancies ended in induced abortion (Bates and Zawadki 1964). 11. Colin Francome criticised Cavadino's conclusions about the number of illegal abortions persisting into the 1970s, but acknowledged that 'there are still some illegal abortions' (1976, 389), carried out by providers who are cheaper than legitimate doctors, and by women in the women's movement. 12. In the United States, Reagan notes that in the first half of the twentieth century women shared with each another 'very specific knowledge' about how to induce abortions. 'Older ladies' shared 'traditional techniques'; younger women shared modern scientific information (1997, 26). 13. It is difficult to compare NHSLS data sensibly with national abortion ratios, because NHSLS data represent the number of abortions in individuals' lifetimes, as compared with conceptions throughout their lifetimes. AGI data measure the number of abortions each year, compared with the number of births in that year. That is, the AGI national abortion ratio measures the abortions only of the current child-bearing population. When NHSLS data are quarantined to the cohort 18–24 years, they reveal a ratio (post-Roe) similar to AGI data: 33.4 per 100 conceptions (Laumann et al. 1994, 457). As Michael's figures measure abortion relative to conceptions (not live births), and between 15 and 25 per cent of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage (McLaren and Shelley 2002; Rajan and Oakley 1993), this factor further reduces Michael's estimates in relation to AGI data. Michael challenges the veracity of AGI data, suggesting that abortion providers overestimate the number of procedures they perform (Michael 1999, 69–73), but in support of the economic model of abortion analysis he cites the work of Marshall Medoff, which is entirely dependent on AGI data. Donohue and Levitt also use AGI data to measure abortion rates, despite acknowledging Michael's objections to them, and despite citing Michael's own data as providing the 'most convincing evidence' on abortion. 14. In 1991, the year prior to the collection of the NHSLS survey data, Operation Rescue staged mass anti-abortion campaigns, forcing Wichita abortion clinics to close for a week (Frank 2006, 92). In 1993, the Feminist Majority Foundation Clinic Violence Survey found that 50.2 per cent of clinics responding to the survey witnessed 'severe anti-abortion violence' during the first seven months of 1993 (Kahane 2000, 469), including death threats, stalking, attacks with chemicals, arson, bomb threats, invasions and blockades. In the 1980s, 200 American abortion clinics were bombed (Gerber Fried 1998, 214). On the question of low abortion-related responses to the NHSLS, Michael concedes only that it has been suggested to him (not that he agrees) that unlike 'most of these other admissions of unattractive behaviours, an abortion may come with an additional "emotional loading" since it is more an admission of a mistake than is, say, a sexual dysfunction or a "disease that is caught from someone else"' (1999, 48, n. 3). 15. The figure was generated from a number of sources and surveys, and gained most prominence after being endorsed by the 1955 Planned Parenthood Federation conference (see Calderone 1958). There is debate over whether the figure, based on samples, represented total induced abortions or total illegal abortions. In a separate analysis based on interviews with five abortionists about their practices in the 1960s, Whittemore concluded that between 360,000 and 890,000 criminal abortions were performed in the United States each year, but given that the incidence of self-induced abortion was unknown, 'the oft-quoted figure of one million criminal abortions in the US is a fairly reasonable estimate' (1970, 217). 16. For example, during the Great Depression, abortion was observed to be 'of considerable and growing importance' in reducing the birth rate (Stix 1937, 673). One gynaecologist observed in 1933 that the Depression had heightened the demand for abortion, so much so that physicians responded by specialising in terminations, 'devoting themselves to that work to the exclusion of any other part of medical activity' (Rongy in Reagan 1997, 147). See also Stix and Notestein (1934, 1935). 17. Medoff (1988) found that Medicaid funding was statistically significant to abortion demand; Garbacz (1990) found that it was not. Gius (2007) found that Medicaid restrictions had 'no effect on the abortion decisions' of young women; the most consistently significant variable to affect abortion rates was women's proximity to an abortion provider: the 'greater the number of per capita abortion providers, the greater the likelihood that a woman would have an abortion' (2007, 504). Donohue and Levitt's own data would appear to acquit the impact of financial cost anyhow. They note that the official abortion rate more than doubled from 1973 to 1980, which includes the period following the introduction of the Hyde Amendment, which restricted government funds for abortion in 1977. Between 1973 and 1977 the US federal government paid for approximately one-third of abortions through Medicaid. In 1978 fewer than 2,500 abortions were covered by federal funds (down 99 per cent from 1977) (Gerber Fried 1998). 18. See, for example, the testimonies of women to the four cases brought in the Federal Court to abolish New York's abortion laws (Schulder and Kennedy 1971

Abortion · Criticism · Economics · Epistemology · Ideology · Legalization · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Populism · Positive economics · Pregnancy · Premise · Sociology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Reproductive Health and Contraception · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Law · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub