I cannot now recall how this came up during discussion, but Professor Soysal and I were discussing a recently released book about the American economy that links the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s to a fall in the crime rate among youths in the late 1990s. I promised to forward a list of links about the book to him, and am including it here for those who are interested in reading more. -- C. Lavender

The Book: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (William Morrow, 2005) (see the information at Amazon)

Reviews, from the author's site: http://www.freakonomics.com/reviews.php

Levitt's summary of his argument on the relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate: http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/

The article that started it all: Donohue, John J. and Levitt, Steven D., "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" (2000). Quarterly Journal of Economics http://ssrn.com/abstract=174508

Profile of Levitt from the Wall Street Journal: http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006550

Overview of argument from Business Week, by a Fellow in Economics at Harvard University: http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/barro/bw/bw99_09_27.pdf

University of Chicago Chronicle: http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/990812/abortion.shtml