Abortion and crime rates....your thoughts?

"Steven D. Levitt & JJ Donohue, as recounted in the book Freakonomics, hypothesised that the reason behind the sudden drop in crime in the early 1990s was due to the Roe v. Wade outcome in 1973 and the subsequent legalization of abortions. The poor and young women who did not want their babies were allowed to have abortions and thus stopped the birth of a generation of socioeconomically disadvantaged children being born into a life more inclined towards crime. The end of the crack epidemic in 1990 coincides with the time when all those born after the Roe v. Wade outcome would have been in their late teens, a time when young men enter their criminal prime. As the years ped, more and more children who would have been born into a life more inclined to crime were simply not there, and crime dropped nation wide. To test for causality rather than correlation, the statistics the authors compiled show that the 5 states which allowed abortions before Roe v. Wade (California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington) had their crime drop earlier than the rest of the country. Additionally, the states with the highest rates of abortion experienced the largest drops in crime and vice versa. This was, however, only one of several reasons put forward for the observed drop in crime. In another chapter dealing with the economics of crack dealing, they suggest that the falling price of the drug made it no longer worthwhile for low-level dealers to risk injury while aspiring to rise higher in their gangs' pecking orders."