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Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births John Lott, American Enterprise Institute John Whitley, University of Adelaide, School of Economics Download the Paper (PDF format) - May 16, 2001 Tell a colleague about it. Printing Tips: Select 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog if you have trouble printing. ABSTRACT: Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital and thus crime. The question is: what is the net impact? We find evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent. Previous estimates are shown to suffer from not directly linking the cohorts who are committing crime with whether they had been born before or after abortion was legal. SUGGESTED CITATION: John Lott and John Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births" (May 16, 2001). Yale Law School. Yale Law School John M. Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy Working Paper Series. Paper 254. http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/lepp/papers/254 | REPOSITORY HOME  | SEARCH  | MY ACCOUNT  | NELLCO HOME | Powered by bepress.