A few years ago the
Inductivist found that Protestant & Orthodox countries favored abortion to a greater degree than Roman Catholic ones. He did add though that many of the nations in the former category were nominally in the category (e.g., Sweden) I have always been curious about if Catholicism has any effect on attitudes toward abortion
within nations. It is known in the USA that there isn't much of a difference between Catholics and non-Catholics on this topic, rather, it is conservative Protestants stand out.
The World Values Survey has a question which asks if abortion is ever justifiable. I thought it would be interesting to break these data down between Catholics and non-Catholics in various countries.
I look at nations which had large Catholic and non-Catholic populations. Not just non-religious (like France), but with religious identified non-Catholics. For example, the Netherlands has large historical Catholic and Protestant populations. I used WVS waves 3 & 4 and aggregated them together. I looked at WVS 5 separately. So some nations are entered twice. Where there were no Protestants, such as in Bosnia, I used Orthodox Christians. In a few Latin American nations Protestants were distinct from Evangelicals. The former usually includes members of historic immigrant communities with culturally Protestant traditions. Their numbers were small in any case, so I simply substituted Evangelical, which usually refers to relatively recent converts to Pentecostalism.
As you can see, most of the variation is between nations, not within them. In many cases Protestants are more pro-life than Catholics. In nations such as Chile most Protestants are relatively conservative evangelicals, disproportionately from the lower socioeconomic strata. In the Netherlands I suspect it has to do with the conservative Protestant Bible Belt, while most liberal Dutch Reformed have simply become "Nones."
| Protestant/Orthodox | Catholic |
| Great Britan | 14.5 | 38.5 |
| Netherlands | 29.9 | 19.8 |
| USA | 23.7 | 27.8 |
| Canada | 33.3 | 28.9 |
| Australia | 21 | 27.6 |
| Brazil | 75.2 | 65.1 |
| Chile | 73.5 | 61.2 |
| Ghana | 65.3 | 63 |
| Colombia | 87.6 | 72.6 |
| Trinidad | 68.2 | 60.8 |
| Germany | 18 | 17.5 |
| Albania | 12.7 | 25.7 |
| Bosnia | 32.9 | 43.1 |
| Chile | 84.8 | 69.3 |
| Czech Republic | 17.8 | 19.6 |
| South Korea | 41.6 | 40.6 |
| Latvia | 25.2 | 30.6 |
| Netherlands | 23.5 | 18.2 |
| Nigeria | 70.2 | 59.1 |
| Puerto Rico | 84.3 | 77 |
| South Africa | 64.2 | 61.3 |
| Zimbabwe | 92.4 | 88.9 |
| Switzerland | 22.1 | 21.9 |
| Uganda | 76.9 | 74.2 |
| Great Britan | 25.2 | 32.7 |
| Tanzania | 87.2 | 91.5 |
| USA | 35 | 38.2 |
| Venezuela | 81 | 70 |
| Northern Ireland | 40.3 | 62.6 |
Labels: Abortion, Religion
