ety of factors that influence crime: a states level of incarceration, number of police, and its economic situation.) Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abor- tion rates and lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given states abortion rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s-when the first cohort af- fected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime-which is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that tipped the crime scale. There are even more correlations, positive and negative, that shore up the abortion-crime link. In states with high abortion rates, the en- tire decline in crime was among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of Australia and Canada have since es- tablished a similar link between legalized abortion and crime. And the post-Roe cohort was not only missing thousands of young male crim- inals but also thousands of single, teenage mothers-for many of the aborted baby girls would have been the children most likely to repli- cate their own mothers tendencies. To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there arent enough hats to go around, the problem isnt solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an "unintended benefit" of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being con- verted into a public good.   Indeed, there are plenty of people who consider abortion itself to be a violent crime. One legal scholar called legalized abortion worse