Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice than men. Not really.
Now that abortion is in the news again I thought I’d check the GSS to see if anything had changed in the last few cycles. As you can see, nothing much has (perhaps a tilt toward more support for abortion rights?). Also, the plot above should make it clear: men and women seem to change their opinions in sync. Basically there is broad social consensus impacting both sexes.
The correlation between the two series over the years is 0.83. So your eyes aren’t lying.
When in online convos I’ve encountered disbelief that this is so, seems like down to shifts in issue framing. It makes some sense in today’s environment, politically for opponents to talk about it in the sense of being an “anti-woman” policy, which then makes most sense as advanced by (mostly imaginary) moustache twirling Handmaid’s Tale-esque patriarchs, and their bullied and dominated wives and daughters. (“Barefoot and pregnant” and “Christian Taliban” moral panics not wholly new, but accelerated in frequency from the fringes more recently).
There’s the shift of the left from a view dominated by more liberal concerns to one dominated by revolutionary liberation struggle movements (Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Black Liberation, queer liberation, post-colonialism, and the shifting choose-your-own buffet of these and more that seems to make up the new academic ideology). Thinking about abortion in terms of individual and inalienable rights to choice around bodily autonomy (vs critics who for various reasons including religion disbelieve this frame), is something I get the impression the US left would increasingly seem to think of as dangerously close to libertarianism, or at least find far less compelling. (‘Rights’, non-material rights in particular, reframed as entitlements and privileges to be treated with deep suspicion as a potential source of group inequity or barrier to utopian “progress”, and as a social mask for group interests. Not seen as important aspirations to be protected, even if imperfectly realised and help political opponents).
Hence maybe re-contextualizing the abortion tribal political value in terms of radfem feminist revolutionary sentiment (abortion, a tool for the liberation of women as a group from their male patriarchal enemies and oppressors).
Having presented evidence about the first order behavior (the same for both sexes), let’s turn for a moment to 2nd order behavior. What is going on during periods when the views of the 2 sexes are not moving together, either going in opposite directions (e.g., 1985-7, 2010-12) or in the same direction but with very different speeds (e.g., 1987-8, 1991-94)*? Some kind of regression to not so much a mean but to each other?
*And what is it with the labeling of X axis, sometimes 1 year, sometimes 2 year intervals?
mp, not sure the sample sizes give us that might insight for gss. gallup probably has then (there is some evidence of variation in intensity when i looked last; liberal women care a lot more than liberal men)
I’m curious about the effect of age in both sexes, but particularly among males. It’s hard to imagine young men under 30, even particularly conservative ones, being very upset by abortion even if they tend to disagree with it, because at a time that your hormones are raging and you ignore advice about “only have sex with a girl you’d want to marry”, it functions as a fail-safe, get out of jail free option in the event that the girl you are with gets pregnant unexpectedly. Anecdotal, but I recall an early 20s coworker at the barely-above-minimum-wage summer job I held in college whose girlfriend got pregnant: when asked why they didn’t just get an abortion, he responded that she didn’t believe in that. They were both officially Catholic, but she seemed to care about it much more than him. I would suspect generally that men’s opposition to abortion varies more significantly with age than it does for women
This is particularly striking because there is a very significant gender difference in partisan voting tendencies. Women are more likely to vote for Democrats, men are more likely to vote for Republicans, and the partisan preference gender gap has never been greater.
Also, Democrats as a whole are surely more pro-choice, while Republicans as a whole are surely more pro-life.
The implication seems to be that Democratic men are probably more pro-choice than Democratic women, while Republican men are probably more pro-life than Republican women. The Democratic distinction could be explained by the fact that women tend to be more religious than men, and that religious people tend to be more pro-life than non-religious people.
The Republican distinction is harder to fathom (and maybe the disparity on the Democratic side between Democratic women and Democratic men is sufficient to fully resolve the paradox). But perhaps Republican women are still more reluctant to have laws that directly regulate them, while Republican men are not as concerned.
Is it possible to do gender and political leaning crosstabs?
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screenshot-from-2020-09-22-12-54-58.png
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screenshot-from-2020-09-22-12-53-58.png
0-2 is dems
3 independents
4-6 repubs
the big thing is independent men are way more prochoice
@andrew, assuming the sex difference in voting is accurate*, I think you may be assuming a lot of alignment between voting preference and abortion sentiment and then imputing a sex-difference within partyid to square the circle.
It seems like the more realistic thing is that sex differences within party are about the same as in the general population, and Democrat women who are anti-ab just compromise on that issue.
The general population tend not as ultra conformist, or put euphamistically, “aligned” and “consistent” in their opinions and with their voting preference as surveying the small slices of Extremely Online might tend to suggest.
(One addition to my comment upthread is that this comment mostly applies the Extremely Online US Left. I’m not sure that most people use either of the frameworks I describe. People at large basically seem to decide on whether a foetus is a person or not, and then if it’s yes then it’s one way and it’s no, another. The idea that, if it’s a yes, then either a woman’s choice and autonomy, or the general advancement of women, still has some moral weight against taking a life, seems be something that normies would basically look at the person stating it as if they were an alien from Mars.
For practical purposes, it’s all about if a foetus is a person or not, because after that point the idea that terminating “a person’s life” is defensible for either reasons of “choice” or the advancement of women as a whole are both just seen as completely laughable by most folks. Like, if a foetus is a person, then there’s nothing to worry about, and any reason is sufficient, while if it *is* then it’s ridiculous that you would even be having that conversation that terminating a person is acceptable under any circumstances and for any reason.
I haven’t had many IRL conversations about this though, as in UK it’s mostly a non-issue that sparks very little interest.)
*and sex-party difference may be or may not be the case for US from what I know. For UK I’m aware that at the moment there’s close to no overall sex difference but a much higher age slope in partyid than in men… but’s that’s the UK.