Roe V. Wade has been overturned, and abortion is en route to handcuffs in 26 states. Social scientists, rejoice!

Wait, what? Why would any social scientist in their right mind want to celebrate a degradation of human rights? Oh, that’s right-the field has been arguing for decades about whether legal abortion was responsible for the late 20th century’s plummeting crime rates. This has been a knock-down drag out fight. Seriously, I ran out of words to link articles in that sentence. The Paper that started it all, Donohue and Levitt, 2000, has 788 citations.

D&L 2000 sparked a fight in the research community that continues to this day. However, I bet no one thought they would get to test falsifiability on Donohue-Levitt, hence why I say it’s time for social scientists to celebrate. I guess that’s one small perk to an entire society sliding back into the mud. In just a few short decades we’ll be able to put this problem to bed by looking at resultant crime rates in states that made abortion illegal again, or by, y’know, getting stabbed walking to our car.

Call me a toxic optimist for looking at the bright side of what is probably the largest mass-repeal of civil rights since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but how often do you get to see the resolution of one of the most satisfying academic slug-fests of the past 20 years? It’s like getting front-row seats to Ali v. Frazier round 4. Now of course, it will take another 20 years to settle the fight, but we’ll start to see early results in 13-15, so fingers crossed that Donohue and Levitt were wrong! Heck, maybe we’ll get lucky and Lott and Whitley’s ridiculous proposal that legal abortion increases murder rate will turn out to be true, and in 20 years they’ll be no murders at all!

No one holds a grudge like an academic

The so-named Donohue-Levitt hypothesis goes like this: children who are unwanted or unsupported are more likely to turn to crime; legal abortion reduces the population of unwanted children. D&L argue their point using census and crime data (total arrests, rather than arrests per capita- which has been a major point of rebuttal).

This wasn’t a new idea, apparently the 1972 Rockefeller commission on “Population and the American Future” cited a 1966 study linking refused abortion to crime, which showed increased criminality in the 120 children whose mothers decided not to go through with the procedure. ...

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