The rebuttal to the Foote and Goetz criticism of a programming error is this:
> Donohue and Levitt subsequently published a response to the Foote and Goetz paper.[12] The response acknowledged the mistake, but showed that with different methodology, the effect of legalized abortion on crime rates still existed.
That's troubling to me. They had a hypothesis, and when the experiment didn't confirm that hypothesis, they simply tried a different methodology that might still show it. That feels like moving the goalposts to me.
It's also representative of the negative feeling I had all the time when reading their book: after all their praise of rigorous scientific methods and of not confusing correlation with causation, they follow that up with making those same mistakes themselves. (And I guess the reason that rubbed me wrong is because that is interjected with continuous praise all the time of Levitt. That in turn probably makes me more likely to criticise, so perhaps you should take my criticism with a grain of salt...)
>The effect of legalized abortion reported by Donohue and Levitt (2001) is largely unaffected, so that abortion accounts for a 29% decline in violent crime (elasticity 0.23), and similar declines in murder and property crime. Overall, the phase-out of lead and the legalization of abortion appear to have been responsible for significant reductions in violent crime rates."
According to your link it doesn't appear to be shobby science.