Did the legalization of abortion really reduce crime rates? Donohue and Levitt (2001) proposed that the legalization of abortion in 1973 led to a dramatic decrease in crime in the United States during the 1990s. The current study tests this theory in the Canadian context, treating the 1988 liberalization of abortion as the exogenous source of abortion variation. Arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reporting Incident-based Survey and abortion rates from the Therapeutic Abortion Survey were used to construct an “effective abortion rate” (EAR) for each year from 1990 to 2020. The EAR sums the product of the ratio of criminal charges for a given cohort and the abortion rate for the year prior to that cohort’s birth (i.e., approximately when the cohort was in utero). Provincial youth violent and property crime rates were then regressed on the constructed EAR term. Despite attempts to align the analysis with Donohue and Levitt’s theory by performing additional regressions on only theoretically-relevant provinces, the link between crime and abortion could not be substantiated.
