After Roe v Wade (a US Supreme court ruling on abortion, millios of poor single women had abortions insread of future potential criminals:20 years later the set of potentialoffenders had shrunk, along with the crime rate. Levitt employed a comparative statistical analysis to show that the five states that legalized abortion at least two years before Roe v Wade witnessed a crime decline earlier than the other 45 states. Further those states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest fall in crime in the 1990s. ......My question is: Did Roe v Wade lead to an increase of criminal abortions, or did it have a moral cleansing effect in many states?
