The Effects of Age and Other Personal Characteristics on Abortion Attitudes

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Literature Review
Research Problem
Hypotheses
Conceptualization and Units of Analysis
Research Design and Methods
Analysis
Works Cited

Introduction

A quarter of a century after the Supreme Court decision in Roe versus Wade effectively laid down the judicial precedent to legalize abortion on the ground of women’s right to privacy, abortion continues to polarize the nation. Within this year alone, three events demonstrated just how much the debate inflames Americans. At the Notre Dame commencement exercises, the newly-elected Mr. Obama dared to confront Catholic conviction about wrongful killing of fetuses by pleading for a common ground between the “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” sides. This is tantamount to seeking a face-saving compromise where the core issues are in black and white and is similar to the uncompromising stands of those for and against homosexual marriage; of pederasts, pedophiles and collectors of child porn versus the larger community that refuses to countenance harming innocent children; and of the Anglican church in the U.K. cutting off the U.S. congregation for ordaining openly homosexual bishops and priests.

On May 31, the Kansan Dr. George Tiller was shot for the second time in sixteen years, this time fatally. He was notorious for continuing to perform late-term abortions even for the sake of the mother’s “mental health”, when there is no longer any debate that the fetus is a human being.

This week, debate and voting started in the U.S. Senate about a health insurance bill proposing to deploy new deficit spending and provide public health insurance for the elderly whose premiums escalate constantly and the poor for whom Medicaid funding is readily exhausted. Among the latter group are large numbers of minority teenage mothers whose boyfriends vanished on learning of their pregnancy. Republican senators, the nationwide pro-life lobby and America’s Catholic bishops are determined that federally-funded insurance should explicitly disqualify elective abortions.

In 2000, the U.S. had the highest rate of teen pregnancies (55.6 per 1,000 females 15 to 19 years of age), about 67% higher than second-ranked New Zealand (33.4 pregnancies), and ranks equal first with Hungary in abortions performed on late-adolescent mothers (30.2 per thousand).

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) contacts legal abortion providers directly and hence, provides a more complete picture than the official estimates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which depends on voluntary reports. At last count (2005), AGI estimated the national total at 1.2 million abortions and that nearly half of all pregnancies are “unintended”, at least so far as claims by mothers are concerned.

Literature Review

Going by the information that is publicly available, published reports have tended to “explain” abortion rates solely in terms of the pregnant woman herself, as if the act of aborting a baby was a purely personal act devoid of despair, immorality, guilt and depression. Sociologists and other behavioral scientists take detachment from their objects of study as an article of faith and would have us believe that importuning boy friend, shiftless husbands, troublesome family environments or over-tolerant parents of young girls do not have to account for the affective impact of abortion because, after all, activist judges say it is a personal decision the woman makes. Her right to privacy theoretically includes the right to conceal apprehension about “unintended pregnancy” from her fellow procreator, a neglectful husband or vanished boyfriend. Thus, judges have even ruled that underage and pregnant teenagers should be allowed to cross state lines for an abortion simply because the other jurisdiction does not require parental consent.

A review of the situation as of 2000 by the Guttmacher Institute’s Jones, Darroch and Henshaw revealed, among others, an abortion prevalence rate of 21 for every thousand women of reproductive age (a universe that obviously includes young adolescents who had arrived at first menarche). The propensity for undergoing an abortion was higher, on the basis of statistical significance, among young singles 18 to 29 years of age, the colored minorities, and the impoverished. While the abortion rate generally declined between 1994 and 2000, poverty and immaturity were said to explain the contrarian trend of a rising abortion rate among Blacks, Hispanics, and especially poor teenagers (226).

Availing himself of the multi-year and nationwide General Social Survey (conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center), Misra (94, 118) fills some of the data gaps by examining attitude trends on top of the usual socio-demographic independent variables. Attitudes towards abortion became more positive through time, especially in the late 1970s after the aforementioned Supreme Court ruling, except among the most elderly in the population. Taken a single independent variable at a time, it seems that Blacks and women resisted the idea of abortion more than mainstream Whites and men did. Although the difference in attitudes between the sexes and races appeared to diminish through time, the introduction of the religiosity variable revealed one important source of variance between those who approved of elective abortion or not. In particular, “Frequency of attending religious services was a significant predictor of abortion attitude in all the subgroups” (117). While dismissing religiosity as an example of a sociopolitical model of attitude formation, Misra nonetheless concedes that what is morally right or wrong explains the female resistance to abortion across the ethnic divide; as well, multivariate analysis of demographic, socio-economic and religiosity variables taken together discriminates attitudes best across all subgroups.

Research Problem

How well does age explain differences in attitudes towards abortion and in what direction? Given the continuing high levels of “unintended” pregnancy among young singles and minors, are liberal attitudes of parents a key antecedent? Does the existence of a moral dimension mean that one should factor in:

Religiosity, particularly frequency of attendance at church services?
Sexual permissiveness?
Pressure from boyfriends and husbands for early/premarital and unprotected sex?
Parental tolerance for first sexual encounter at minority or even in high school, whether or not contraceptives are available?

Hypotheses

One may state the null hypotheses to be tested as follows:

H₀¹ : There is no difference in attitudes towards abortion by age: <30 years and ≥30 years.
H₀² : There is no difference in attitudes towards abortion by frequency of attending church services.
H₀³ : There is no difference in attitudes towards abortion no matter how permissive females are in respect of premarital and extramarital sexual behavior.
H₀⁴ : There is no difference in attitudes towards abortion by pressure exerted by boyfriends and husbands for sexual intercourse.
H₀⁵ : There is no difference in attitudes towards abortion by liberal or absent guidance from parents in respect of first sexual encounter from menarche onwards.

Conceptualization and Units of Analysis

The dependent variable of attitude towards abortion shall replicate the approval (“Yes/No”) items in the NORC GSS in order to facilitate comparison with the large body of literature that exists. These are the contingent justifications for elective abortion: a married couple not desirous of any more children (NOMORE in the GSS database), the probability of the infant being born with a congenital defect (DEFECT), peril to maternal health if the baby is carried to term (HEALTH), low family income cannot support more children for a married couple (POOR), the single expectant mother has no wish to marry her partner in sexual intimacy (SINGLE), and conceived due to rape (RAPE). To cover two more contingencies and recent judicial pronouncements, we shall seriously consider piloting three additional items:

The woman is single and the boyfriend has broken off the relationship;
Conceived with a close male relative, whether consensual or not;
A single female concealing the fact of premarital sexual intercourse from her parents.

All these items are nominal in nature.

Frequency scales of an ordinal nature shall be constructed and pilot-tested for the IV’s religiosity and pressure for intercourse from boyfriends and husbands. In turn, parental tolerance shall be measured by admonitions about staying “chaste,” using contraceptives, or the lack thereof.

Permissiveness shall be formulated as a Bogardus Scale of Social Distance in respect of approval for physical contact and sexual intimacy ranging from holding hands, necking, embracing, light petting, heavy petting, oral sex, anal sex and intercourse. For each type of intimate behavior, the degree of relationship shall range from “just friends,” in a casual or exclusive relationship, engaged to be married and married.

Research Design and Methods

This study will test a model where attitude toward abortion is the outcome and DV of permissiveness as IV, parental tolerance as antecedent variable and two intervening or modulating variables: pressure from male partner and religiosity.

Analysis

At the stage of data analysis, the nine opinion items about abortion shall be subjected to factor and discriminant analyses to investigate the possibility of building a compound variable “measuring” levels of approval.

Works Cited

Jones, Rachel K., Jacqueline E. Darroch and Stanley K. Henshaw. 2009. “Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 34, (2002): 226.

Misra, Ranjita. “Effect of Age, Gender and Race on Abortion Attitude.” The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 18 (9/10: 1998): 94-120.

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