In the United States, from 1975 to 1980, the crime rate had risen over eighty percent. Many criminologists believed that the increase in the crime rate was due to numerous variables, like an unstable economy, issues pertaining to civil rights, and an insufficient amount of police officers. However, many experts over looked the impact that abortion had and still has on crime today. Before 1973 having an abortion was illegal, except when it was used to save the life of the mother. Abortion during that time was dangerous and expensive prohibiting women from receiving them, and birth control was not easily accessible. In the 1970s only New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii made abortion legal and broadly available. On January 23,…show more content… It is important to note that since this article was done in 2001 all of the evidences cannot represent anything past 2001. Donohue and Levitt first presented their readers with a graph with data that was received from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. It showed the trends between violent crimes, property crimes, and murder from 1973 through 1999. They used this graph to explain since 1991 the per capita crime rates in these three categories were on a steady decline. The main purpose of this graph was to show that after 1973 when abortion was legalized it was not an immediate drop in crime, the drop occurred about seventeen years after the illegalization, and that is around the age when most adolescent start to get into legal trouble. They then estimated the percentage of crime that could have come from the amount of abortions that occurred that year and compared it to the chart above. Donohue and Levitt were able to make their estimation by making this equation…show more content… In 1991 using this equation based on the three factors in the crime rate graph that data showed 33 for homicide, 63 for violent crimes, and 126 for property damage. They further explain that the property damage is disproportionate because this crime is done by younger people than those involved in homicides and violent crimes. But in 1997, the numbers rose to 142, 180, and 252 alluding to the fact that legalized abortion had a positively statistical correlation with the decrease in crime rates during the twentieth century. They ended up combining all of the data that they had and put it into a table separating the five states that first legalized abortion from the other states who waited to legalize abortion and compared the three categories (violent crimes, property crimes, and murders) difference between their drops in crime. The table is broken up by six year periods, and the negative signs in the difference column means that suggest that crime rates dropped faster in the early legalizing states, and the positive sign means the opposite.