Legalized Abortion: What the Research Says

The idea for Consensus came from wanting instant answers to the questions ‘what does the science actually say about x, y, z?”

Now that our product is live, we will be sharing a variety of things found using Consensus.

This week we are asking, what does the research say about….the impact of legalized abortion

Click the above link and keep reading to see the findings Consensus instantly extracted from peer-reviewed literature on this topic.

The research-backed impacts of abortion access

Note: The following is a review of relevant literature in the Consensus beta product. This article does not represent any political opinions of Consensus or its employees.

The landmark 1973 supreme court case Roe v. Wade protected the right to a legal abortion in the US. Across the globe many other countries also increased access to legal abortions in recent decades. Since then, hundreds of researchers have tried to quantify the impact of these rulings.

According to our initial search above, we can breakdown the impact into three main buckets:

Women’s economic outcomes: research shows that laws that restrict access to abortion…

• Harm economic outcomes for women
  • And increase the risk of acute economic hardship

While access to legal abortion..

• Increases labor force participation for women and contributes to national economic growth
• Increases wages for both minority and low-wage workers

Women’s health outcomes: research suggests that access to legal abortion…

• Improves health outcomes for women across multiple countries
  • From a report by by the Guttmacher Institute
• Reduces maternal mortality
• Reduces the number of deaths related to abortions for women
  • Similar finding in South Africa
  • And in Nepal
• ‘Considerably’ improves non-mortal health outcomes for women in Mexico

Crime rates: some research suggests that access to legal abortion….

• Decreases crime rates by up to 50%
  • This claim was popularized by the best-selling book, “Freakonomics” 

While the Donahue and Levitt finding is extremely famous, it is not without its critics. Others find:

• Abortion had minimal effect on crime rates
  • Another paper from the same author attributed the decline to changing drug use

However, other researchers continue to support the original Donahue claim, with evidence from different countries

• This one from a study of Western European countries
• And another from Canada

Hopefully this article demonstrated that you can use Consensus to search for interesting findings in the social sciences. Please feel free to reach out if you think I got anything wrong, or to suggest next week’s query of the week!