Family Instability and Female Justice System Involvement: Reinterpreting the Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime

Female offending has profound familial and societal consequences, yet its distinct pathways remain understudied. Social control theory posits that female delinquency is more sensitive to familial relations and parental supervision than male delinquency (Worthen, Deviant Behavior , 2012, 33, 282). Because those seeking abortions disproportionately face structural disadvantages that impede stable caregiving, abortion access is theorized as a macro‐level proxy for reductions in maladaptive familial environments (Foster et al., JAMA Pediatrics , 2018, 172, 1053). This study adapts Donohue and Levitt's ( The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 2001, 116, 379) landmark two‐way fixed‐effects analysis in The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime to evaluate whether early‐life familial environments differentially influence male and female arrests. The empirical findings prove highly sensitive to model specification. In the preferred per‐capita specification with state‐level error clustering, the female abortion coefficient loses statistical significance entirely, while male estimates remain small and unstable. This lack of robust support suggests that prior aggregate conclusions collapse under gender disaggregation. Ultimately, this study demonstrates the failure of blunt macro‐proxies to capture complex, gendered pathways to arrest, and highlights the need for intersectional approaches in social science research.