Significant year

Those of you who don’t know the significance of the year 1991 will probably be fascinated.

Nineteen ninety-one was the peak year in American crime. Crime has declined every year for the past 20 years.

The best explanation comes from the paper, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by Stanford University law professor John J. Donohue III and University of Chicago economics professor Steven J. Levitt.  

Like most good research, Donohue and Levitt found their data by accident while researching another subject.  Abortion in the United States began to rise five years before Roe v Wade in many states.  After Roe v Wade it grew rapidly. 16 to 18 years later crime began to drop rapidly.

To put it clearly, this has been confirmed many times, the babies that were aborted turned out to include a high proportion of potential criminals.

The most recent stunning data I have seen, shows that teenage pregnancy began to decline in 1991 also and is today 70% lower than in 1991.

The unwanted fetuses from the 1970’s would have been the source of not only crime but teenage pregnancies.