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US crime drop tests Freakonomics abortion theory — in 2042
A long-running academic debate about falling US crime rates is about to get a live experiment. The only catch is that it will take two decades to run.
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America’s 2025 crime statistics showed the sharpest year-over-year drop in murders and violent crime since 1936. President Donald Trump’s supporters pointed to tough policing as the cause. A longer view suggests a deeper debate may get a live test – two decades from now.
Violent crime has been trending down since the early 1990s, barring a pandemic-era spike. In their 2005 book Freakonomics, economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argued that legalized abortion played a bigger role than any policing strategy. The logic: after the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973 made abortion legal nationwide, the birth rate of unwanted children collapsed. Fewer children born into unstable homes meant fewer young adults committing violent crime roughly 20 years later.
The theory was always politically charged. Abortion remains one of America’s most divisive issues. That division now creates a natural experiment.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. Republican-run states moved quickly to ban or severely restrict abortion. Democrat-run states kept it legal. If party control of those states holds for roughly two decades, analysts will be able to compare crime rates in abortion-ban states against abortion-legal states starting around 2042.
“The split-run data would let us test the abortion-crime link directly,” said a researcher familiar with the debate. “You’d compare cohorts born after the bans came in against cohorts from states where abortion stayed legal.”