Abortion

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We find that abortion rate has a significant and negative impact on crime rates, specifically, homicide and theft. We also observe support for the impact of legalization of abortion on the reduction of crime when considering different calculations of the accumulation of abortions based on different criteria for the legalization of abortion.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0144818814000568

We estimate that overall crime fell 17.5% from 1998 to 2014 due to legalized abortion—a decline of 1% per year. From 1991 to 2014, the violent and property crime rates each fell by 50%. Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over this period, and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline.

https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/22/2/241/5973959?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

Legal access to abortion reduced the fraction of women who became teen moms by one-third, and it reduced the fraction of women who got married as teenagers by about a fifth.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101570014/abortion-access-tends-to-lower-child-poverty-rates-economists-say

[W]e show that the five states that legalized abortion in 1970–three years before Roe vs. Wade–saw crime begin to decrease roughly three years earlier than the rest of the nation.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/08/does-abortion-prevent-crime-2.html

The authors say their strongest evidence comes from the fact that crime rates have dropped the most in states with the highest abortion rates.

https://www.science.org/content/article/falling-crime-rates-linked-abortions

Researchers using difference-in-differences research designs have found that abortion legalization reduced the number of children who were unwanted (Bitler and Zavodny, 2002a, reduced cases of child neglect and abuse (Bitler and Zavodny, 2002b; 2004), reduced the number of children who lived in poverty (Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, 1999), and improved long-run outcomes of an entire generation of children by increasing the likelihood of attending college and reducing the likelihood of living in poverty and receiving public assistance (Ananat, Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, 2009).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-can-economic-research-tell-us-about-the-effect-of-abortion-access-on-womens-lives/

From 6 months to 4.5 years after their mothers sought abortions, existing children of women denied abortions had lower mean child development scores (adjusted β -0.04, 95% CI -0.07 to -0.00) and were more likely to live below the Federal Poverty Level (aOR 3.74, 95% CI 1.59-8.79) than the children of women who received a wanted abortion.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30389101/

However, mixed-effects models adjusting for clustered recruitment and multiple observations per child revealed that poor maternal bonding was more common for index children compared with subsequent children (9% vs 3%; adjusted odds ratio, 5.14; 95% CI, 1.48-17.85).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30193363/