The “study” you refer to(I only put it in quotes only because I’m not sure that it indeed was a study) is the work of Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist who co-authored “Freakonomics.” I’m too lazy to do the footwork myself, but you might want to check out if it was just a very sensible idea with some statistical correlation or an idea that’s well supported by the data.

What supporters of abortion rights really should do is to shape the debate completely differently. To an extent that’s been done by making it a “woman’s right to choose.” But there’s a larger issue at stake here, too.

Everyone knows that the wealthy and the middle class will always have access to abortions whether they are legal or not. They have the money to find the people who will do it illegally if necessary, and the pregnant women in most cases have support networks around them to help out (usually those support networks are best in terms of preventing pregnancy in the first place). The poor and the indigent often lack those same familial support networks that we educated middle class elite take for granted. So they haven’t been properly schooled on how not to get pregnant. And when they do, who do they go to? Those are the people that abortion laws should protect.

I don’t know the source of the study, but I’ve just heard that the drop in crime in recent years has been attributed to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Here’s why: the babies that were aborted after that decision would mostly have turned out to be criminals. It’s no big secret that the majority of crime is committed by poorer, lower class people. These same people who are most in need of abortion rights. Those fetuses that were aborted in the mid-70s would now be in their late 20s/early 30s - a ripe age for committing crime.