(Note: The following press release was prepared by Brunel University of London.)
Abortion is murder – the emotive rallying cry popular with pro-life campaigners keen to convert others to their cause. But what if opposition to abortion isn't all about sanctity-of-life concerns, and instead at least partly about discouraging casual sex?
That's what psychology researchers found in experiments designed to test what really drives anti-abortion attitudes in the USA. The study, published today in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, challenges how most pro-life individuals justify their views on abortion.
"Previous research has sometimes assumed that pro-life attitudes are sincerely driven by beliefs about when life begins or about sanctity-of-life concerns," said Dr Jordan Moon, a social psychologist and lecturer from Brunel University of London. "But people often care deeply about the behaviour of those around them. In particular, some people believe that loose sexual norms are damaging to society. People who associate abortion rights with loose norms might thus dislike abortion."
The researchers – Dr Moon and Dr Jaimie Arona Krems, from the University of California, Los Angeles – distinguish between two possible accounts: a "face-value account," which takes people at their word that their opposition to abortion is driven solely by sanctity-of-life concerns, and a "strategic account," which suggests that pro-life positions are at least partly motivated by other concerns, which people might not be consciously aware of.
"The strategic account doesn't imply that pro-life individuals are being disingenuous," Dr Moon explained. "When they say that abortion is murder, they aren't lying about what they believe."
To test the strategic and face-value accounts against each other, the researchers assessed US citizens' support for different political bills aimed at saving the same number of lives and having the same costs to taxpayers, but varying in their implications for the costs of casual sex.
In three experiments, they showed 1,960 participants, at random, different bills that would reduce abortions in different ways:
- a punishment bill that would make abortions illegal, with fines and possible jail time for women and the doctors – which could be perceived as making casual sex more costly
- a comprehensive sex education bill that would prevent unwanted pregnancies, and therefore abortions, through birth control – which could be perceived as facilitating casual sex
- an abstinence-only education bill that would prevent unwanted pregnancies by discouraging sex before or outside marriage – which could be perceived as inhibiting casual sex
The participants rated the bill they were shown, and answered questions to assess how religious they are, their political leanings and their views about casual sex.
All bills were described as preventing the same number of abortions, so if the face-value account was correct, then each of the bills would be similarly supported.
However, the strongest opponents of abortion showed strong preferences against the comprehensive sex education bill, instead giving relatively more support to bills aimed at preventing abortions by punishing women for abortion, or by providing abstinence-only sex education – a bill that differed from the comprehensive sex education bill only in being explicitly opposed to casual sex. These results held even when controlling for religiosity, social conservatism and economic conservatism, suggesting that they are not simply due to religious or conservative preferences.
Additional analyses found that participants do indeed agree that the punishment and abstinence-only sex education bills are somewhat intended to – and likely to –decrease casual sex, relative to the comprehensive sex education bill.
"On balance, the data from our experiments lend greater support to the strategic account," said Dr Moon. "Indeed, our findings present some challenges to the face-value account. People who say abortion is murder don't seem to equally support all possible policies that would reduce abortions. Rather, it seems that they prefer policies that prevent abortions specifically in ways that discourage casual sex."
Dr Moon added that both pro-life and pro-choice individuals get behind memorable mantras chanted at protests. "It's possible that the commonly-voiced justifications for pro-life positions, such as sanctity-of-life concerns, are not actually the cause of pro-life attitudes, but are more socially desirable than other possible justifications," he said. "I think this is a common process that happens within all of us. We often don't know where our attitudes come from, but when we present them to others, we naturally want to present the best arguments we can think of. In this case, saying you oppose abortion because you care about life is probably more convincing than saying you don't want society to be accepting of casual sex."
The researchers do not suggest that motivations to discourage casual sex are the sole driver of anti-abortion attitudes, given that even the strongest abortion opponents tended to report at least moderate support for comprehensive sex education in both experiments.
"Abortion attitudes likely depend on a wide range of influences," said Dr Krems, an associate professor of psychology, "and abortion opponents are not unique in making moral arguments that may be, deep down, self-interested. Rather, our findings simply suggest that all people are prone, at least to some extent, to self-interested biases across a wide variety of moral judgements."
