Regarding my Master’s thesis, it studies polarization in North American’s abortion attitudes. I was able to locate a very nice lacuna in the literature, and built upon existing literature to solve this lacuna. But, without further ado, I will let the preface speak for itself:

Attitudes on the permissibility of induced abortion vary widely in the United States of America. How people think about abortion has often been the topic of scholarly studies, which highlighted aspects ranging from the level of the streets with protests either ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’, to the level of legislation and Supreme Court rulings, to the public opinion on abortion. The question whether public opinion on abortion has become more polarized received substantial attention of social scientists, as well. This study adds to this body of literature on polarization in the North Americans’ public opinion on induced abortion. It contributes a new explanatory framework on polarization of public opinion which allows much of the existing literature to be brought together, a suggestion for a statistical approach for analyzing hypotheses derived from this model, and new hypotheses derived from this model.

Chapter 1 describes a background on the abortion issue in the United States, and three generations in the development of research on abortion attitudes are identified. To contribute to the third generation, three research questions are formulated that share the goal of developing and testing an explanatory model for attitude polarization. In chapter 2, it is explored how a theory of polarization should be formulated. A theoretical framework for such explanations is developed, based on the identification of three mechanisms constituting polarization. In chapter 3, the theoretical model is substantiated with theories on attitudes on abortion, and hypotheses on the polarization of North Americans’ attitudes towards abortion are derived. Chapter 4 contains a detailed description of the data that are used to test these hypotheses. Also, a procedure is suggested to analyze polarization. This procedure is used throughout chapter 5, in which the hypotheses formulated in the third chapter are tested. The concluding chapter 6 then relates the outcomes of these analyses back to the three research questions from the first chapter. Also, limitations of the used approach, directions for future research, and the implications of the findings for the used theories are discussed.

Several people and organizations have contributed to this project, with financial or other means. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization responsible for collecting the data of the General Social Survey used in this study, made sensitive data available for use in this study. This made it possible to take into account the state in which people live. The funds required for obtaining these additional data were made available by Ariana Need, and are part of her NWO VIDI subsidy.1 Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute sent a very detailed, historic overview on state-level legislation on abortion in the United States.

I conclude this preface by expressing my sincere and kind gratitude towards my supervisors Ariana Need and Manfred te Grotenhuis. They contributed profoundly to this project by providing ideas, advice, and methodological guidance. To me, however, of much greater importance was how they have helped me to strike a fair balance between ambition and personal life events.

One of the elegances of sociology is found in the unintended consequences of our actions. In my studies of attitudes towards abortion, I found a nice example of such unintended consequences regarding the Catholic church. But, I doubt that the findings are warranted by the analyses.

The theoretical background of the article by Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox (1993) is rather straightforward. It is well known that the Catholic church opposes against the practice of induced abortion. Therefor, it is expected that individual members of the Catholic church will be influenced by this doctrine, and will object against induced abortion more often than, for instance, non church members. On the other hand, people not objecting against abortion, or even having an explicit pro-choice stance on the issue, might feel threatened by the presence of a strong Catholic church in their presence, and express their pro-choice attitudes more strongly. From this the expectation is derived that in regions with high proportions of Catholic church members the non-Catholics will be more permissive towards abortion than in regions with low proportions of Catholics.

The authors test these two assertions using data from an exit-poll, collected in 42 American States. Using regression analyses, they find that indeed individual Catholics have a stronger pro-life stance than non-Catholics. On the contextual level they find the expected opposite result: when controlled for individual Catholicism, people living in a state with a high proportion of Catholics tend to be more permissive towards towards abortion. Apparently, according to the authors, the Catholic church is very well capable of instilling their pro-life stance on abortion in its members. And, again according to the authors, the presence of a strong Catholic church in a state mobilizes the non-members to express an strengthen their pro-choice stance.

However interesting the expectation and supposed finding about the unintended consequences of the presence of strong Catholic church might be, I doubt these findings are warranted by the analyses. Allow me to be a little bit technical. The analyses basically consist of two parameters (plus several controls): individual and contextual level Catholicism. Both variables are added to a multiplicative regression model simultaneously, which has led to the findings as described above. However, the authors seem to interpret the model as if a cross-level interaction effect between individual and contextual catholicism had been estimated as well, which was not the case. Their interpretation of the findings that the effect of contextual Catholicism only instills pro-choice attitudes amongst the non-members would only be warranted by such an interaction term.

Instead, I would think that a proper interpretation of their findings would be that, when controlling for individual Catholicism, the presence of a high proportion of Catholics leads to stronger pro-choice attitudes for everyone. Even, on average, for the Catholics themselves. Of course this is not explicitly tested, requiring an interaction term added to the model as argued above, but it could be interpreted as that people tend to fight for what they think is important when their opinion is contested by the presence of others with a different opinion, and what in a different context would remain salient.

How’s that for an unintended consequence of membership of the Catholic church?

Cook, Elizabeth Adell, Jelen, Ted G., Wilcox, Clyde (1993). Catholicism and Abortion Attitudes in the American States: A Contextual Analysis Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32 (3), 223-230

(click on the graph for a larger image)

To give an impression of how abortion attitudes have developed in the United States, I created a graph which is shown in figure 1. Using survey data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative survey program in the United States, I was able to visualise the policy preferences regarding induced abortion for Americans living in nine different regions ((More detailed state-level aggregation is possible in principle, but the data required to do so are not publicly available)). The available data cover the period from the legalisation of induced abortion in the United States, to 2005. Respondents were asked under which conditions they think it should be possible for a pregnant women to have an abortion. The subsequent conditions were:

• The woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy
• The woman’s pregnancy is a result of rape
• There is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby
• Family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children
• The woman is not married and does not want to marry the man
• The woman is married and does not want any more children
• The woman want an abortion for any reason

The graph in figure 1 represents for each of these conditions the proportion of respondents (both men and women) that agreed with each condition. Since the same conditions were asked to respondents every wave of the survey, it is possible to visualise trends over a long period of time.

The graph learns us several things about abortion attitudes in the United States. To start, it is shown that, apart from fluctuations, the overall level of acceptance of induced abortion remained relatively stable in each of these nine regions. Interestingly, much of these fluctuations seem to have occurred during the early 90’s.

Furthermore, it is very clear that two ‘groups’ of responses occur. `Health’ related abortions (woman’s health in danger, pregnancy as a result of rape, defect in baby) have much higher levels of acceptance than ‘discretionary’ abortions (low income, unmarried, no more children, any reason). This is true for each of the nine regions shown. Not all is the same in these regions, however, for large differences between the regions in average levels of accepting abortions are clear, especially with respect to the discretionary abortions. In the Pacific region, approximately 60% of the respondents think that a woman should be able to have an abortion for discretionary reasons, whereas in the E.S. Central region acceptance has been as low as 20% in 2002.

Finally, closer examination shows that that amongst the discretionary conditions, the variation between the different conditions has decreased. For instance, in the Mountain region, we see differences in levels acceptance of almost 20 percentage points amongst the discretionary items (with approximately 40% of the respondents accepting an abortion for any reason, and approximately 60% when the family cannot afford any more children). These differences, however, waned over the years and in 1995 all the four discretionary conditions have very similar levels of acceptance. To a lesser extent, the opposite might have happened regarding the health-related conditions. Whereas the level of acceptance for having an abortion when the mother’s health is in serious danger remained relatively stable in the nine regions, acceptance for having an abortion when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when there is a serious chance of a defect waned slightly.

Of course, this is only an overview graph, and an overview interpretation of that graph. Nevertheless, I think it provides some interesting insights in the development of the American public opinion on induced abortion.