Yes and no

 This post follows from my previous one, which was about opinions on abortion.  I mentioned that the GSS has questions about "whether it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion" in six different circumstances, and also one about whether it should be possible to obtain a legal abortion if "the woman wants it for any reason."  I said I would leave the last question out because "I suspect that some respondents interpret it as asking whether abortion should ever be allowed." This post reports on some further analysis of that question. I computed a variable as the sum of the number of "yes" answers for the six different conditions (risk to health, pregnancy due to rape, chance of birth defect, single and doesn't want to marry the father, married and doesn't want more children, too poor to care for a child).  A cross-tabulation of answers to the "any reason" question and the number of conditions for which they said abortion should be legal:

                 0          1          2         3          4         5         6

Yes           0%  0.1%   0.5%   1.7%  1.9%  3.1%    36.8%

No         8.3%  6.2%   9.4%  20.1%   5.9%  3.5%   2.4%

The base for the percentages is the whole sample, which is cumulative from 1977-2018--e. g., 36.8% of the respondents said that a woman should be able to get an abortion for any reason and in all six specific circumstances.  That's a consistent position in favor of legal abortion.  No on "any reason" is consistent with any number of yes answers to specific circumstances--it means that you think there should be some limits on legal abortion (even someone who says yes on all six conditions that the GSS asked about might think there are some cases in which abortion should not be legal).  But the ones highlighted in red are logically inconsistent--a woman should be able to get a legal abortion for any reason, but not for some of the reasons offered in the other questions.  Those answers add up to 7.3%.   There's some pattern in the "inconsistent" answers:  they are more common among less educated people and people who score lower on a test of vocabulary, suggesting that they're given  by people who don't recognize the contradiction or misunderstand the "any reason" question.

But there's also a pattern over time:

The "inconsistent" combinations are becoming more common.   

Consistent support for a general right to abortion (ie, "yes" on the any reason question and all six specific questions) has increased somewhat.  

Belief that abortion should (almost) never be allowed--that is, saying no to all six specific questions and the general question--also has increased.

That means that what you could call "mixed" opinions--that abortion should be allowed for some reasons, but not any reason--has declined.  Of course, you could say that the "inconsistent" positions are also mixed in a sense.  I wondered if the increase might be limited to Democrats, who might want to say that they are "pro-choice" in principle even if they have doubts about some cases, but it was about equally strong among independents and Republicans.  

I'm not sure how to interpret this.  I've noted before that there's been some movement towards extreme positions on abortion, but I don't know why "inconsistent" positions should have become more common.  If they were simply based on misunderstanding the "any reason" question, as I initially thought, they should have been roughly constant, or maybe declining because of the increase in educational levels.