What Perceptions Do Americans Have About Abortion?
This is our last Thursday seeing clients in The Netherlands!
For the last two years, Julia and I have lived in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
We had a pipe dream of starting a therapy business in Europe, but that was quickly overturned by two realities:
It’s really fucking hard to start a new business when you don’t have external funding. We would have to give up money in the short term in order to invest in marketing and building new clientele in Europe. And we simply didn’t want to do that. We enjoy traveling too much.
We stumbled into this burgeoning community of formerly Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal (EMPish) folks, and began investing in Sexvangelicals, creating a 50-episode (and growing) introduction to deconstructing and reconstructing that we lovingly refer to as “the sex education the church didn’t want you to have”. While there is a growing amount of attention given to the concept of religious trauma in the field of psychotherapy, almost all of the products focus on the development and healing of the individual. We discovered that we are two of about ten therapists nationwide that are researching the impact of EMPish communities on relationships and specialize in relational and sexual health.
Moving back to the US makes the most sense for us, despite the optical insanity of a move five months prior to an election in which authoritarianism is on the national ballot.
Which brings us to tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Although, I’m not sure “debate” adequately describes a conversation between one of the world’s brightest, most seasoned politicians and a raving lunatic. Wordsmiths—what’s a more appropriate word to replace the word “debate”?
Even though Trump won’t win the popular vote, it’s still mind-blowing that a smidge over 40% of the American electorate will vote for Trump, and in doing so, expend emotional energy performing mental gymnastics and moral incongruences to overcorrect for the plethora of inaccurate, hateful, and plain stupid comments that Trump’s made over the last decade.
We’re reminded that, despite the amount of data organizing and communication from quality research, journalism, science experiments, and focus groups, perception is reality. As Stephen Colbert described in his epic depiction of truthiness:
“Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.”
God, I miss the Colbert Report.
There are fewer topics in American political discourse that are influenced by truthiness than abortion.
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On Tuesday, we talked about the brilliant work from The Turnaway Study, where a group of researchers conducted a long-term series of interviews with almost 1000 women who have either had an abortion, or pursued an abortion but were denied and forced to continue with their pregnancy. I drew out 10 immediate themes that women who had abortions described, and I highly encourage you to read Diana Greene Foster’s in depth analysis of the study in her book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion.
10 Facts About the Experiences of Women Who Choose to Have Abortions
Today, I want to talk about the research of Kristen Jozkowski, researcher at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. (The Kinsey Institute is the premier research center on sexual health in our country.) Jozkowski and her colleagues conducted the Abortion Attitudes Project, where they interviewed 600 English and Spanish-speaking Americans throughout the country about their perceptions about abortion. I appreciate their desire to make their research sample highly reflective of American culture. 48% of the participants were men. 49% of participants identified as pro-choice. 29% spoke Spanish as their first language.
As Jozkowski and colleagues explain in the article Participant-driven salient beliefs regarding abortion: Implications for abortion attitude measurement, published in March 2024’s Social Science Quarterly, they asked their research participants three questions, and I’d encourage you to answer these questions for yourself:
What are the circumstances under which you, your partner, or a woman would have an abortion? Jozkowski refers to these as control beliefs, or beliefs about factors that might influence one’s decision.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having an abortion? Jozkowski refers to these as behavioral beliefs, or perceived consequences of engaging in a particular behavior.
Who are the relevant people that might influence a decision to have an abortion? Jozkowsi refers to these as normative beliefs, which reflects beliefs about what other people think about the behavior.
As you read through these results, please compare and contrast what people perceive should be true (the truthiness factor) with what people who have personally engaged with this experience, in this case, women who have pursued abortions, have described about the process.
Jozkowski and colleagues observed that commonly answered this question with a large number of caveats. While many people mentioned multiple circumstances, only 6% of participants stated that “any reason she wants” is a valid reason to pursue an abortion. In fact, they noted that 60% of research participants said that extreme circumstances, such as sexual abuse and the health of the fetus and mother, were acceptable causes for abortion.
(The Supreme Court, sans the ethically compromised Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, caught wind of this and, in leaked documents released yesterday, pushed back against the state of Idaho around this very issue.) 44% of participants only mentioned these extreme cases.
As we mentioned Tuesday, the Turnaway Study reports that finances and the lack of parental readiness were the most common reasons that women pursued abortion. Greene Foster explains in the book that while women pursue abortions because of sexual abuse, it happens much less commonly than is otherwise insinuated by Republican “pro-life” legislation.
Only 34% of Jozkowski’s sample reported that financial concerns were appropriate reasons to pursue an abortion.
Only 26% of Jozkowski’s sample reported that concerns about the fetus’ quality of life, either due to biological or sociological factors, were appropriate reasons to pursue an abortion.
Only 17% of Jozkowsi’s sample reported that age and emotional readiness were appropriate reasons to pursue an abortion.
The most common advantage that research participants mentioned to having an abortion were to avoid health concerns either for the pregnant person or the fetus, or to avoid having the reminder of sexual violence. (As the partner to someone who has active symptomology of PTSD following sexual abuse, the idea that aborting a child could somehow bring healing to the abhorrent event of sexual assault is insulting, but that’s another Substack altogether.) 33% of participants mentioned this factor.
Only 17% mused that abortion could have financial advantages, and only 11% surmised that abortion could bring social or emotional advantages to the pregnant person.
On the other hand, 48% of participants described that abortion has some sort of emotional consequences following the abortion. Again, the Turnaway Study reports that 95% of women felt positive about their decision to abort (or pursue an abortion if they did) five years after.
21% mentioned that abortion would lead to physical health complications either during or as a result of the abortion. The Turnaway Study reports that women who were rejected from having an abortion were much more likely to develop physical complications during the pregnancy.
This stat is one of the most disheartening parts of this study. Only 34.5% of participants noted that the pregnant person is an influential person (Jozkowski and colleagues use the term “salient reference”, which I’ll be using for the rest of this section.) 30.5% of folks considered the pregnant person as the most salient person.
Likewise, 56.2% of research participants listed the partner as a salient reference, with 38% of people suggesting that the partner is the most salient reference.
Once again, the needs of women take a back seat to the needs of men when it comes to , even though women literally carry the brunt of growing and feeding a child (for those who decide to breastfeed).
51.5% of research participants listed family members and other close relationships as salient members, with 23.4% suggesting they should be the most salient. This stat triggers the question, “Who is a pregnancy actually for?”
As someone who studies EMPish religion and the influence of relationships and sexuality, this stat was fairly humorous. 19.4% identified God and religious communities as salient, but only 1% said that the religious communities should be the most salient.
Holding the Turnaway Study and the Abortion Attitudes Project next to each other, as we’ve done Tuesday and today, reminds us that communal perceptions and shoulds about a topic can be wildly different from the actual lived experience of people who are going through the particular topic.
Jozkowski and colleagues added a brilliant component to their research: They asked people to describe the values that formed their attitudes toward abortion. Participants determined three sources, and often stated multiple values:
Bodily autonomy and personal choice
Adherence to and utilization of the law
Morality
People who place a high value around bodily autonomy were the ones who were most likely to name the pregnant person as the most important salient referent. Jozkowski also noted that a lot of people framed abortion as a human rights issue, either for the pregnant person, or for the fetus.
There’s a much larger conversation about the construction of morality: What makes something right/wrong, and good/evil? As we’ve studied, the Purity Culture movement, a foundation laid by Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, and others in the 70s, marketed and capitalized by James Dobson, Denny Pattyn (developer of Purity Rings) and thousands of others in the 80s and 90s, and morphed into legal standards during the 00s and 10s, is ultimately an attempt to sell and indoctrinate a particular moral framework. Morality is much more influenced by politics and capitalism than we would otherwise like to admit.
Our value at Relationship 101 is to listen to the experience of people, and allow the experiences of people, especially when those experiences are shared by large numbers, to take precedent in answering the question “What is true about ____?” than your own thoughts about something.
What did you find most interesting when reading these two articles? Leave your answers in the comment section:
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia
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