Men, women, and abortion

In my last post, I mentioned that men and women do not differ much in their opinions on abortion--this post will document that point.

1.   The General Social Survey has seven questions about whether abortion should be allowed in various circumstances.  This post looked at gender differences on these questions in recent years (208-18) and found that men were more likely to support legal abortion on each one, but the differences were small--the biggest gap was 50% to 44%  for "if she is married and does not any more children".

2.  Gallup has a question on whether abortion should be legal under any circumstances, under only certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances.  During the 1970s and 1980s, support for "any circumstances" was about the same among men and women; since then, it's been a little higher among women.  Support for "illegal in all circumstances" has consistently been a little higher among women.  See this discussion at the Gallup site.

3.  Since the 1990s, a number of survey organizations have asked if abortion should be "legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases."  The figure shows the averages for men and women on a scale of 1-4, with higher numbers indicating support for legal abortion:

 

 Women are a little more favorable.  There is a trend towards more support for abortion, but it is about equally strong among men and women--that is, the gap is not changing.*  The variance also tends to be higher among women--that is, women are more likely to choose the "all cases" options on both sides, as with the Gallup question. 

4.Since the 1990s, CBS News surveys have asked if "abortion should be generally available to those who want it, abortion should be available but under stricter limits than it is now, or abortion should not be permitted".  I use the percent saying "generally available" minus "not permitted" as a summary.

By this measure, support for abortion is a little higher among men.  I was getting tired of entering data by this point, so I didn't record the percent in the middle category--therefore, I can't tell about likelihood of picking the extremes vs. the middle.

To summarize, some surveys find that men are a little more likely to support legal abortion, others find that women are a little more likely, but the basic point is that there's not much difference.  Finally, I'll mention a CBS News/New York Times survey from 1998, which asked about a couple of other circumstances:  "if the pregnancy would force a teenage girl to drop out of school" and "if the pregnancy would  force a professional woman to interrupt her career."  The interesting thing about these questions is that they don't involve issues of traditional morality (like marital status) or health, but focus on a woman's ability to plan her life.  But there was no clear gender difference on either--for the first option , 43% support for legal abortion among men and 41% among women; for the second, 27% support among men and 24% among women.

If opinions just reflected interests, you would expect support for legal abortion to be higher among women than among men.  So the lack of a clear difference means that there must be some factor working in the other direction, maybe involving the way that men and women think about moral issues in general.   

*The trend is still there if you remove the two early surveys that show unusually low support for abortion. 

  [Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Public opinion on abortion

 I've had a number of posts on various aspects of public opinion about abortion, but none of them give a general overview, so that's what I'll try to do here.  Although there are some puzzles on specific points, I think that a pretty clear and consistent picture emerges.

1.  Overall distribution of opinions:  the most straightforward question is one by Gallup, which asks if abortion should be legal under any circumstances, under only certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances.  The last time it was asked (2021), the percentages were 32%, 48%, and 19%.  If you ask about specific circumstances, support for the "always" and "never" positions seems lower--that's reasonable, since someone answering the general survey question isn't going to have time to think about all the possible circumstances.  If you ask about saving the life of the woman, support is 90% or more.  If you ask specifically about abortion in the last trimester, only 8% say that it should always be legal.  The Gallup numbers are a pretty good summary if you understand them as being about roughly the first half of pregnancy and implicitly add the qualifier "except for rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman" to the last option.  

2.  Change:  there has been little change in the overall distribution of opinions since the 1970s.  If you look closely, you can find some changes, but they are small.  

3.  Gender:  there is little difference in the opinions of men and women.  Some surveys find that women are a little more likely to support legal abortion, others find that men are--see this post.  I will have a post documenting this point in more detail in the next week or so.

4.  OK, what does matter for opinions?:  Education and age--more educated people and younger people are more favorable.  Over time, younger generations replace older ones, and younger generations tend to be more highly educated, which would increase support for legal abortion.  Given the absence of a clear trend, there must be age and/or period effects working in the other direction.   Religion--religious people, especially evangelical Protestants, are more opposed.  Region--people in the South are more opposed.  This is partly but not entirely due to differences in religiosity.  I haven't looked closely, but I think it's specifically white Southerners who are more opposed and that regional differences among blacks are smaller.  Those are the biggest factors.  There is also some difference by race, with blacks more in favor of legal abortion; there's not much difference between Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites. 

5.  Roe v. Wade:  most people say that the Roe v. Wade decision should not be overturned.  For example, a CNN survey from January asked how you would feel if the Supreme Court "completely overturned" the decision:  14% said happy, 12% satisfied but not happy, 25% dissatisfied but not angry, and 35% angry.  A 2019 survey for NPR/PBS News Hour offered a number of options about what the court should do:  13% said overturn it; 26% said keep it but add more restrictions; 14% said keep it but reduce some restrictions; 21% said expand it to establish the right to abortion under any circumstances; 16% volunteered keep it the way it is, with 11% don't know.  That's a combined total of 39% for more restrictions and 35% for fewer.  (Some surveys ask a general question about whether there should be more or fewer restrictions than there are today, and get similar results).

6.  Parties:  more people feel that they are closer to the Democrats on abortion and trust the Democrats to do a better job of dealing with abortion.  The differences aren't large, but they've been around for a long time and are pretty consistent.  For example, an AP survey from July 2021 asked "which party do you trust to do a better job of handling abortion policy?"  27% said the Republicans, 40% said the Democrats, 11% both equally, and 21% neither.  Back in 1989, the Gallup and Harris polls asked similar questions:  Gallup showed a 37%-34% edge for the Democrats and Harris showed a 43%-29% edge.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

It's not (just) the economy, stupid, part 2

 In my last post, I tried to explain why satisfaction with the state of the country declined from about 1986 to 1992, despite decent economic conditions and very positive developments in foreign affairs.  Now I'll turn to the rising satisfaction from 1992 to the late 1990s.  The obvious answer would be that economic conditions were good, but as I noted in my last post, there's still a substantial positive trend after you control for the unemployment rate.  Of course, there are other economic conditions that might matter, but  the three that generally have the most impact on public opinion are unemployment, economic growth, and inflation.  I controlled for recent change in unemployment, which is strongly correlated with growth, and that didn't add anything; inflation wasn't much of a factor in the 1990s.  So I'll turn my attention to other things.  I proposed that events in national politics might explain the declining satisfaction in 1986-92, but I don't think that they could explain rising satisfaction in 1992-9.  The big events were conflict between Congress and the President, including the government shutdowns of 1995-6 and the endless investigations of Bill Clinton culminating in the impeachment effort of 1998-9.  So overall, the politics of the 1990s weren't inspiring and nobody came out of it looking good.  

Then what could explain the positive public mood?  In their analysis of the data, Andrew Gelman and Yair Ghitza noted that their was a correlation between satisfaction with the direction of the country and satisfaction with one's own life.  It seems plausible that at least some of this is causal going "upwards"--if things around you are going well, you'll feel good about the direction of the country.  One of the things that changed in the early 1990s was crime, which began a long decline.  I regressed satisfaction on unemployment, the murder rate, and a time trend, and all were statistically significant.*  The observed and predicted values:

Adding the murder rate doesn't fully account for the rise in the 1990s, but it helps.  More generally, I think that in the 1990s people began to adjust to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s.  Their seemed to be less tendency to regard single parenthood as a moral failing and as crack use declined, less alarm about drugs.  The Aids epidemic started to come under control, with effective treatments starting to appear and the number of new cases peaking in the early 1990s.  As a result, people became less alarmed about the overall direction of social change. 

Of course, this is an ad-hoc analysis--I've proposed two different things to explain different periods and I'm still in the 20th century.  But while parsimonious explanations are intellectually satisfying, sometimes things really are complicated.

*I decided that I should make some effort to take account of serial correlation.  To my surprise, I couldn't find any software for dealing with serial correlation in irregularly spaced time series, or even much literature.  So I began by assuming a first-order autoregression, used non-linear regression to estimate the autoregressive parameter, and then computed generalized differences, with the degree of differencing depending on the gap from the previous observation.