March 2003

Greetings,

 This is the first installment of the new incarnation of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s service, Research News Reporter (RNR).  While our previous format called your attention to research described in major news media, the new format will call your attention to a more select number of studies from a diverse set of sources that you might not otherwise become aware of.  We'd love to hear from you about how you use this new service.

 The new RNR will be distributed monthly, highlighting the most inventive, informative and innovative research recently released.   Each selection will include a short description of the research and either a link to the report itself or a citation of where the report can be accessed.  We hope that you will find the new RNR informative!

 Sincerely,

 Dr. Heidi Hartmann  
 President and CEO

1. Unemployment Watch: Women’s Unemployment Increases Across the Board in February 2003

March 11, 2003
Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Vicky Lovell and Meghan Salas

This report analyzes the February 2003 unemployment data for trends in women’s joblessness and concludes that every group of women (for which data are available) experienced greater unemployment in February than in the previous month.  Women heads of households and women of color were especially affected.

          http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/unemployment3-7-03.pdf

2. Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault

January 2003
National Electronic Network on Violence Against Women
David A. Wolfe and Peter G. Jaffe

This report identifies trends and developments in prevention initiatives for domestic violence and sexual assault.  It finds that school-based programming can be very effective for prevention and education, as can community-based programming. 

http://www.vawnet.org/VNL.2/Resources/Research/AR_Prevention.pdf

3. Parental Leave: The Impact of Recent Legislation on Parents’ Leave Taking

February 2003
Wen-Jui Han and Jane Waldfogel

This report analyzes the impact of available, unpaid family leave on men and women after the birth of a child from 1991 to 1999.  The results indicate the limits of unpaid family leave and the importance of paid-leave laws and policies.

To access this article, please see the journal Demography, Volume 40-Number 1, February 2003: 191-200.

4. Families Coping without Earnings or Government Assistance

February 1, 2003
Urban Institute
Sheila Zedlewski, Sandi Nelson, Kathryn Edin, Heather Koball, and Kate Roberts

This paper contains interviews with families with children living without government cash assistance and examines reasons for joblessness, welfare experiences, and alternative economic supports. 

http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410634

5. Small but Significant Steps to Help the Uninsured

January 2003
The Commonwealth Fund
Jeanne Lambrew and Arthur Garson, Jr.

This report argues that, despite the current economic climate, there are a number of low-cost policies that would give coverage to more Americans who lack access to affordable health insurance. 

http://www.cmwf.org/programs/insurance/lambrew_smallsignificant_585.pdf

6. Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce

March 2003
National Bureau of Economic Research
John J. Donohue III, Steven D. Levitt

This paper is in response to an article challenging the results of a previous study arguing for a connection between abortion and lowered crime.  The authors present further evidence that a causal link does exist between legalized abortion and reduction in crime.  

You can purchase this paper online at http://papers.nber.org/papers/W9532

Below is a Washington Post article summarizing the findings of the report.

The Washington Post

March 11, 2003, Tuesday, Final Edition

 New Data on Abortion-Crime Link
 Richard Morin and Claudia Deane

 There's new and stronger evidence to support one of the most provocative and controversial social theories of recent decades, namely that abortions reduce crime, two economists contend in a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

John J. Donohue III of Stanford University and Steven D. Levitt of the University of Chicago first formally proposed the link between abortion and crime in an article published two years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Now they've updated that study with fresher data and a more detailed analysis, in large part to answer the many critics of their earlier work.

These researchers theorize that legal abortion reduces crime by making it easier for women to end unwanted pregnancies. By their reckoning, more abortions mean fewer neglected or abused children who would be more likely to end up in trouble with the law.

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortions more widely available, the generation born around this time should contain disproportionately more "wanted" children than earlier generations -- children who would be less likely to commit crimes when they grew up.

Three pieces of evidence support their claims. First, crime dropped sharply during the 1990s -- precisely the period in which the generation of children first affected by Roe v. Wade reached its peak of criminal activity. Second, the five states that legalized abortion in 1970, three years before the landmark abortion ruling, were the first to experience the drop in crime. Third, states with high abortion rates in the early 1970s experienced the biggest decline in crime, even after controlling for other factors usually associated with changes in the crime rate, they wrote.

Overall, Donohue and Levitt found that a 10 percent increase in the abortion rate was associated with a 1 percent decline in the crime rate. They estimated about half of the overall decline in the crime rate between 1991 and 1997 was due to legalized abortion.

Well, they got hammered by a small army of researchers who questioned their data, methods and findings. Among their critics: the researcher John R. Lott Jr., currently at the American Enterprise Institute, who produced a study that argued abortion caused crime by weakening moral values. Theodore Joyce, an economist at the City University of New York also challenged their results. He carefully analyzed the same data but did not find a negative relationship between abortion and crime in the six-year period from 1985 to 1990, or the time the Roe v. Wade generation should have been entering their peak crime years.

So Levitt and Donohue went back to their number crunching. They collected more data and redid their analysis -- and found that abortion seemed to have an even bigger impact on crime than they first estimated.

Instead of reducing homicides by about 14 percent, the new data suggested an 18 percent drop associated with abortion. Violent crime and property crime also went down as the abortion rate went up, and by a bigger amount than they had earlier forecast, they reported in their new study.