Attitudes toward abortion legality and abortion regulation: Insights from a nationally representative study

Objective National public opinion polls and surveys use different questions from one another to assess people's abortion attitudes. We included commonly asked abortion attitude items on a single survey to examine people's attitudes toward abortion legality and abortion restriction to creat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social science quarterly 2024-09, Vol.105 (5), p.1649-1667
Main Authors: Jozkowski, Kristen N., Crawford, Brandon L., Hawbaker, Amelia, Parker, Erik, Golzarri Arroyo, Lilian, Turner, Ronna C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abortion
abortion attitudes
abortion restrictions
Adults
Attitudes
Illegal abortion
Latent class analysis
Legality
national polls
Polls & surveys
Public opinion
Public opinion surveys
survey research
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Summary:Objective National public opinion polls and surveys use different questions from one another to assess people's abortion attitudes. We included commonly asked abortion attitude items on a single survey to examine people's attitudes toward abortion legality and abortion restriction to create profiles of people which we then compared across state groups. Concurrently assessing attitudes toward both abortion legality and restrictions is important given the changing abortion legislative climate in the United States. Method We administered an online survey to U.S. adults (n = 919) via Ipsos probability panel and used latent class analysis to identify classes of participants. Then, we used multinominal logistic regression to make state‐level comparisons. Results We identified three classes: (1) 35.0 percent—abortion should be illegal/more restricted, (2) 35.1 percent—abortion should be legal/laws should reflect the status quo, and (3) 29.9 percent—abortion should be legal/more available. Trigger‐law states comprise the largest proportion of people who think abortion should be illegal/more restricted, whereas states without trigger laws comprise similar proportions of people from all three classes. Conclusion Concurrently measuring whether people believe abortion should be legal and the extent it should be restricted can provide a more comprehensive understanding of people's attitudes and demonstrates important state‐level nuances in attitudes.
ISSN:0038-4941
1540-6237
DOI:10.1111/ssqu.13443