ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Now to a surprising new finding on abortion restrictions - property crimes go up when abortion becomes less accessible. That's according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors zoom in on the years after Texas added in new abortion restrictions in 2013. Olivia Aldridge from member station KUT reports.
OLIVIA ALDRIDGE, BYLINE: Almost a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, there was Texas' House Bill 2. It added strict new requirements for how clinics that provided abortion in Texas operated. More than half of such clinics in Texas closed after the law passed, and most remained closed even after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the law. Economists from a handful of universities decided to look at various effects of those closures. When Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College joined the research, she wasn't surprised to find that as distance from a clinic that provided abortion increased, numbers of live births went up.
CAITLIN MYERS: We've known for a long time that those restrictions pose a very substantial barrier to people seeking abortions.
ALDRIDGE: Myers and her co-authors found signs of increased financial strain in affected counties - lowered labor force participation, more housing insecurity and rising debt. They also found higher rates of financially motivated property crimes, like burglary and motor vehicle theft, especially in counties where the distance to a clinic increased by a hundred miles or more.
MYERS: We estimate about a 15% increase in property crimes. That's the piece that I found very surprising, that it was just so large.
ALDRIDGE: This new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research isn't the first to consider the idea that abortion access could have an impact on crime rates. Back in 2001, the economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue published a controversial and contested paper arguing that the legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade in the 1970s was partly responsible for a decrease in crime seen in the 1990s. By contrast, Myers says she and her co-authors weren't focused on long-term trends, but rather the natural experiment the Texas law presented. Data from before and after the policy change shows an immediate shock to crime rates.
MYERS: Ours is really about kind of immediate destabilizing effects for an economically vulnerable population and what happens next.
ALDRIDGE: Jonathan Gruber is an MIT economist who was not involved in the research. He said the findings, while novel, are consistent with the existing body of economic research on abortion.
JONATHAN GRUBER: It seems a very plausible approach and a plausible finding. As with any important and controversial finding, I hope that more folks will follow up and confirm it.
ALDRIDGE: The researchers looked at the period from 2009 to 2019. A lot has changed since then. Abortion is even more restricted in Texas and many other states. Myers says, next, she wants to test the same economic models looking at before and after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. For NPR News, I'm Olivia Aldridge in Austin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
