Stephen Dubner

The first track is that Steve Levitt and this guy, John Donahue, who's now at Stanford, I believe, a legal scholar, had done this paper before I met Levitt.

This is how Levitt kind of got on the map.

that showed a causal relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate.

It's not a complicated argument.

It takes a long time to describe it, only because there's a kind of collage of evidence that goes into making it up.

But the argument essentially is that abortion often serves as, I was going to say, a form of birth control.

That's not really right.

Preventing an unwanted child.

Right.

It's a decision that happens often when a would-be mom feels like the time and place are not right.

Yes.

And I would make the umbrella that large because there are a lot of things that can go into that.

Right.

Maybe you're very young.

Maybe you've already got kids and the time is not right.

Maybe you or your family are in a bad financial situation.

Maybe you were raped.

So there's a lot.

And there is a body of social science research that argues unquestionably

that when a child is born into a wanted situation, let's call it, whatever the family is.