Abortion and Crime, Revisited (Update)

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🗓️ 28 October 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

With abortion on the Nov. 5 ballot, we look back at Steve Levitt’s controversial research about an unintended consequence of Roe v. Wade.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. Two years ago, the US Supreme Court struck down
0:07.5	Roe v. Wade, the court's 1973 ruling made abortion legal throughout the US. With this new ruling the
0:14.9	legality of abortion was kicked back to the states. Since then 13 states have banned
0:20.0	abortion and 8 others have imposed more limited restrictions.
0:24.4	This election day, November 5th, voters everywhere will be choosing a president and the
0:29.3	voters in 10 states will also be considering ballot measures that aim to protect abortion
0:34.3	access. Kamala Harris has said that if she becomes president she would sign a bill
0:38.4	to once again make abortion legal nationwide. Donald Trump's position is less clear.
0:44.0	Harris says that Trump would sign a national abortion ban,
0:48.0	but Trump has denied this and said the issue should be left to the states. Whatever the outcomes on election day, the fact
0:55.2	is that abortion laws in the US are in the middle of a big shift with consequences that are
1:00.4	hard to predict. The law of unintended consequences isn't really a law, but it is at least a principle that we talk about a lot on this show.
1:10.0	And there was one particularly noteworthy unintended consequence of Roe v. Wade that Steve Leavitt and I wrote about in Freconomics way back in 2005.
1:20.0	We revisited this topic in 2019 in an episode of Freakonomics radio.
1:24.8	At that time a lot of state legislatures, especially in the south and Midwest,
1:29.5	were already moving to restrict abortions.
1:32.1	Considering the state of play today, I thought it might be worth hearing
1:36.0	that 2019 episode again. It's called Abortion and Crime revisited. We have updated facts and figures throughout. As always, thanks for listening.
1:47.0	When you think about unintended consequences, when you think about two stories that would seem to have nothing to do with each other,
1:54.2	it is hard to beat the stories we are telling today. The first one, if you follow the
1:59.7	news even a little bit, should be familiar to you. It concerns one of the most contentious issues of the day.
2:06.0	New developments in the escalating battle over abortion, the last clinic in Missouri on the verge of closing today.
	...

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