Saturday, June 8, 2019

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming

I was going to write another post about the difference between the opinions of political elites and the general public, and I will in the not too distant future, but I saw a New York Times story about opinions on abortion.  It pointed out that although the parties take clear positions in favor of legal abortion (Democrats) or against it (Republicans), a lot of people are somewhere in the middle:  should be legal for this reason but not that, or generally available up to some point in the pregnancy and very limited after that. 

The story allowed comments, and the most-liked comment (as I started this post) noted that they didn't show opinions of men and women separately.  The author didn't explicitly say what she thought that would show, but the implication was pretty clear: "The effects of abortion laws cause women to lose their agency. subject women to invasive, degrading and unnecessary procedures and counseling, force women into economic hardship.  If a set of laws are designed solely to denigrate the status of one segment of the population...."  A couple of replies to the comment pointed out that there wasn't much difference between the opinions of men and women, but none of them got more than a handful of likes, so it seemed worthwhile to show the figures.  These are from the General Social Survey, 2008-18.  The general introduction is "please tell me whether you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if" and there are a number of questions giving different conditions.  The percent of men and women who say abortion should be legal:

                                                                                               Men          Women
The woman's health is seriously endangered                        89%           88%
She became pregnant as a result of rape                               80%           75%
There is a strong chance of a serious defect                          76%          73%
She is married and does not want any more children            50%          44%
The family cannot afford any more children                         47%          44%
The woman wants it for any reason                                       46%          44%
She is not married and does not want to marry the man        44%          41%

There is a small but definite tendency for men to give more support to legal abortion.  Not all surveys find this--for example, this Pew survey finds women are slightly more in favor.  "Little or no difference" would be a reasonable summary.  It would be interesting to have information about whether people think there is a difference, but I don't know of any surveys that asked about that.

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