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Recent
research has drawn a link, sometimes a causal link, between
the legalization of abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s
and the precipitous decline in crime in the 1990s. Abortion
is posited to have reduced the number of potential victims
and potential perpetrators, and the potential effect is examined
when these individuals would be reaching their high-crime
years. We examined a more proximal potential association between
legalized abortion and homicide, specifically, the homicide
of young children. Assuming that abortions occurred when the
family had insufficient resources for the birth, one could
hypothesize that children would have been at higher risk of
homicide if born into these circumstances. We examined 19601998
U.S. mortality data for children under 5 years of age using
an interrupted time series design. The legalization of abortion
was not associated with a sudden change in child homicide
trends. It was, however, associated with a steady decrease
in the homicides of toddlers (i.e., 1- to 4-year-olds) in
subsequent years. Although in the predicted direction, the
decrease in homicides of children under 1 year of age
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