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]