Pro-lifers prefer punishing errant women to preventing abortions through sex education.
Anyone here ever suspected that anti-abortion advocates may not be purely motivated by the doctrine that personhood begins at conception?
If so, you may feel vindicated by this study, which has delved beneath the lily-white rationales of people who seek to prevent abortions and to punish those who administer and receive them.
What they may really be driven to punish, the study suggests – and this may not shock you – is casual sex.
Researchers from Brunel University of London and UCLA tested which of two accounts, “face value” and “strategic”, of pro-life advocacy was the more plausible. The first is that proponents are genuinely convinced that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder, the second that it is “potentially nonconscious motivations to suppress others’ casual sexual behaviour which give rise to anti-abortion attitudes”.
Suppressing especially female sexuality is a fun social pastime across cultures, they note, and there is data to show that “people who are likely to support the suppression of casual sex are also likely to oppose recreational drug use and marriage equality” – any loosening of Puritan behavioural norms, in other words.
Pregnancy being one steep cost of casual sex, abortion reduces the cost and therefore encourages the behaviour.
The authors do not suggest advocates are making consciously disingenuous arguments, but that they are making the best-sounding argument, unaware of their own true motivations.
They tested this with a sample of more than 1000 Americans, weighted towards Republicans, who were asked to agree or disagree with two statements: “Abortion is a type of murder” and “Abortion violates an unborn person’s right to life”.
They also measured their religiosity and social and economic conservatism.
Subjects were assigned randomly to read one of four bills, all purporting to spare the same number of abortions and cost the same amount:
- A punishment bill to make abortions illegal, imposing fines and potential jail time for both women seeking and doctors performing abortions.
- A comprehensive sex education bill that would provide information about and access to birth control.
- An abstinence bill that would provide sex education that explicitly discourages sexual activity before or outside of marriage.
- A health bill purports that would save infant lives by providing critical provisioning for newborns in need.
The bills were assumed to either discourage casual sex (a and c), facilitate it (b) or be neutral (d).
Lo and behold, opposition to abortion based on sanctity-of-life concerns did not positively predict support for all abortion-sparing bills equally.
Their figure is worth reproducing as it shows (in green) the extraordinarily steep association between abortion opposition and desire to, in the authors’ words, “punish women”.
There’s a less marked but still strong positive association between opposing abortion and supporting abstinence-only sex education.
Abortion opposition is negatively associated with support for the comprehensive sex education bill – even though it purports to save the same number of abortions.
And the health of infants? Meh. Flat line.
In a second experiment to reinforce their findings they took 554 participants, measured their abortion opposition and showed three bills – punishment, comprehensive sex ed and abstinence – to all of them.
This time they explicitly tested the assumptions about the effect each bill was likely to have in encouraging casual sex (they held up).
They found those steep lines again: the more opposed, the more participants favoured punishing women and the less they supported education.
The results held when adjusted for religiosity and conservatism.
While concluding that sanctity-of-life arguments are more akin to propaganda than genuine motivator, the authors don’t let pro-choice proponents entirely off the hook either, as those who appeal to “bodily autonomy” arguments are likely also to support seatbelt laws.
“[W]e do not suggest that abortion opponents are unique in engaging in self-interested moral judgments, nor that they do so more egregiously than others,” the authors conclude. “Rather, we suggest that all people are prone, at least to some extent, to self-interest biases across a wide variety of moral judgments.”
Given that a putative US-wide abortion ban is, in research they cite, predicted to cause substantial increases in maternal mortality – and a third woman has just died in Texas – it’s hard to entirely agree with that egregiousness bit.
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