미국에서의 낙태 규범과 범죄와의 상관관계 분석 연구에 대한 고찰

Abstract

The changes in abortion policy especially legalization present empirical researchers with an ideal mechanism through which to identify causal relationships between changes in incentives relating to social circumstances. Legalization of abortion in America lowers the cost of obtaining an abortion, since it removes any penalties that the state can impose on those seeking or providing abortions. Increased public funding for abortions through, for example, Medicaid lowers the cost of abortion. Parental notice requirements, mandatory waiting periods, requirements that information about abortion alternatives be provided to individuals seeking an abortion, and the like all serve to increase the effective cost of obtaining an abortion. Though the causal connection between crime and abortion is less directly obvious, the literature linking abortion and crime has attracted attention well beyond the academic journals in America. John Donohue and Steven Levitt hypothesized that legalizing abortion would affect subsequent crime rates through a number of different channels. If legalizing abortions reduces the number of children born, it would also necessarily eventually reduce the number of individuals in the age cohort (late adolescence) that commits most of the crimes. This would represent about half of the actual crime decrease witnessed during the 1990s, when the first legalized abortion cohort reached its peak crime years. Marianne Bitler and Madeline Zavodny examine the effect of abortion access changes on a specific category of crime – child abuse. Bitler and Zavodny speculate that aborted babies are not a random draw from the population of conceived children. Instead, abortion is likely to be systematically related to wantedness. Bitler and Zavodny hypothesize that increasing abortion access should lead to less child abuse. Bitler and Zavodny find that legalization significantly lowered the incidence of child abuse for the cohort of children who were conceived after legalization occurred. Surprisingly, their results suggest that parental consent or notification laws were associated with lower rates of abuse. Applied econometricians have exploited these experiments to generate a veritable cottage industry of abortion studies, examining everything from child abuse to crime. These studies of abortion policies will continue to generate provocative results. Because this literature is fairly technical, however, it will be difficult for policymakers to draw informed inferences about abortion law. In Korea it should be required amending the law on abortion. We should go through the process of careful discussion before we are prepared to modify legislation on abortion. I suggest that Econometric researchers and jurist shocalors have exploited to examine numerous important social relationships, including the effect of incentives on the effect of limiting unwanted births, crime rates, suicide rates as well as the direct effect of changes in abortion policy.