Evidence for the most basic need provided by a mother comes from a controversial quarter. Starting in the 1990s, crime rates plummeted across the United States. Why? For liberals the answer was the thriving economy. For conservatives it was the larger budgets for policing, expanded prisons, and three-strikes sentencing laws. Meanwhile, a partial explanation was provided by legal scholar John Donohue of Stanford and economist Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago—it was the legalization of abortions. The authors’ state-by-state analysis of the liberalization of abortion laws and the
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