Is the Personal Always Political? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Abortion Attitudes

Abstract

In a study on abortion attitudes, attributional and symbolic politics approaches were used to develop a model relating symbolic predispositions, perceptions of responsibility for unwanted pregnancy, affects, and attitudes toward abortion in samples from Japan and the United States. College students rated 6 causes of unwanted pregnancy on importance, controllability, responsibility, blame, sympathy, anger, judgments in favor of abortion, and likelihood of helping personally or through government assistance. Symbolic predispositions of religiosity, conservatism, moral traditionalism, and gender-role attitudes were also measured. Path analyses revealed that judgments in favor of abortion and helping were determined by a combination of attributional variables and symbolic predispositions in both samples. However, symbolic predispositions are weaker and the attributional variables are stronger determinants of attitudes in the Japanese sample as compared to the sample from the United States.